


Action and Reaction

by Energybeing



Category: Angel: the Series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Doctor Who (2005)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-07
Updated: 2018-07-23
Packaged: 2019-02-11 17:30:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 20
Words: 32,138
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12940209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Energybeing/pseuds/Energybeing
Summary: Illyria hasn't moved in years. Then she hears it. The drumming...





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I do own neither Buffy nor Doctor Who. Please don’t sue me for using them.
> 
> Set after ‘Chosen’ and ‘Not Fade Away’, and about 18 months before the events of ‘The Sound of Drums’.

In the Slayers’ Headquarters in Cleveland, there is a room.

Even though the building is busy, people coming and going all the time, no one goes into the room. No one leaves. Even though there never seems to be enough space, no one tries to find it in the room. Even though it’s not uncommon for Slayers to drag their boyfriends or girlfriends into empty rooms, none of them are ever dragged into _this_ room.

Because the room isn’t empty.

The room has a bed, chairs, bookshelves, and none of them have been used for years. They are all covered in a thick layer of dust.

So is the woman who stands in the centre of the room. She hasn’t moved for years. She didn’t move when there were full-scale battles erupting in the corridors outside her room. She didn’t move when spiders began spinning webs in her hair. She doesn’t leave the room, and no one comes in. That’s the way things have been for years. Occasionally, a bright young Slayer will ask why, and someone older, someone who was around when the woman wasn’t always in the room, will tell them a story. A story about a God who died, and came back in the body of a young woman. A God who’s waiting for the end of the world.

They’re wrong. She isn’t waiting. Waiting would imply that she expects something to happen at some point, that there’ll be a particular moment when she can _stop_ waiting. But she has no such expectation.

Sometimes, they say that the God is hibernating, that she’ll sleep until the world ends, at which point she’ll wake up and rule over the ashes.

They’re wrong. She isn’t hibernating. Her mind is working constantly, thinking, planning, calculating. She is always, always awake.

It would be more accurate to say that she exists. She simply is. No one is entirely certain _what_ she is. She was a God, that much is certain, and now she’s not. More than this cannot be said.

In the Slayers’ Headquarters in Cleveland, there is a room. Illyria stands in it, perfectly still.

~*~

Then, one day, the drumming starts.

Illyria can hear it. It’s quiet, just on the edge of hearing, but it doesn’t ever stop. Just a four-beat rhythm, repeating over and over and over and over again.

At first, she thinks that it’s some kind of magic, something that the witch is working, but as the days go by and the sounds of Headquarters are exactly the same as they always are, she comes to doubt this. She realises that the Slayers, keen though their senses are, can’t hear it. They don’t even know it’s there.

But she can hear it. She doesn’t know what it is, doesn’t know what it’s for, doesn’t know who’s causing it, but she can hear it and for the first time in years, Illyria thinks that she might have found something interesting.

She closes her eyes, and listens. Listens carefully, trying to pinpoint it. It’s harder than it should be, even as weak as she is. She realises quickly that there are multiple sources, but that shouldn’t be a problem. Not for her. It’s as though the signal doesn’t want to be found.

She opens her eyes, and smiles. A spider who has spun an intricate web between her face and the nearby chair is disturbed, but she doesn’t notice. She’s realised what the drumming is doing, and she’s excited.

For the first time in years, she leaves her room. The door’s hinges squeal from disuse, but she doesn’t notice.

She walks down the corridor and into a room down the hall. There are several Slayers sprawled in chairs, talking, watching TV. One of them is texting on her phone. All conversation stops as she enters the room, which is fine by her. She has no interest in human chatter. She takes the phone from the Slayer's hand and turns to leave.

The Slayers leap to their feet, crying out that there’s a demon, demon in the lounge. They try to hit her, but they are slow and clumsy and Illyria has had years to become accustomed to her form and work out exactly how much force is required to incapacitate a Slayer.

The door to her room squeaks shut even before the corridors are swarming with Slayers responding to the alarm. She sits at her desk, looking at the phone, listening to the drumming. Even now, this close, it’s difficult to hear. She smiles again, and then she takes the phone apart.

She’s disappointed when the drumming stops, is even more disappointed when she can’t work out where the drumming came from. Her shell was good at this, she reflects. If there was something in the phone, in _every_ phone, she should be able to find it. That means that it’s not something physical.

She puts the phone back together again, and there it is, the drumming. The four-beat rhythm greets her like an old friend that she hasn’t met yet. It must be in the signal, she reflects. She’ll have to track it down, figure out where it came from. She has to meet them, the person behind the drummer. She has to tell them that she knows what they’re doing, and how happy it makes her to see it being done.

The door opens behind her. “So.” Willow says. “You want to tell me why you stole Kira’s phone?”

Illyria mulls this over. “No.”

Willow sighs. “Just... give it back, ‘kay? And don’t do it again. Most of these girls don’t know who you are – pull something like that again and you’ll get yourself killed.”

Illyria thinks of the Slayers she left behind in the other room. “Unlikely.”

“Right.” Willow says. She sighs again. “Will you at least give the phone back?”

Illyria stands, and looks at the witch. The witch looks back. She is, Illyria thinks, the only person still living who knew the shell before the shell became Illyria. She remembers talking to Willow, back then. She remembers the kind of things they used to talk about. “The signal for the phone. Where does it come from?”

Willow frowns. “What? What do you mean?”

Illyria merely stands, looking at her. She knows Willow understands.

Willow shrugs. “Archangel, probably. It’s a network of satellites.”

“Who launched them?”

“How am I supposed to know? There are fifteen of them! They were launched all across the world, I doubt one person did it all.”

Illyria digests this. “I see. I require a computer.”

“Why?” Willow asks suspiciously.

Illyria doesn’t answer. Doesn’t point out that, if she needed a computer, she could take one. This is her being polite.

Willow nods. “Fine. You can borrow - _borrow_ \- mine.”

Illyria thinks about this. She knows that Willow will try to work out whatever Illyria is going to do with the computer, when she takes it back. She also knows that she isn’t capable of stopping the witch from finding out if she truly wants to know. Illyria nods. “That is acceptable.”

Willow takes Kira’s phone, comes back about half an hour later while later with a laptop under one arm. She finds Illyria standing in the centre of the room, just like she always does, except that there are the smashed remains of a different laptop littering the room.

Willow doesn’t ask Illyria what she did with the laptop. She knows she won’t get an answer. Instead, she leaves again, and makes a note to tell Buffy that Illyria’s up to something.

~*~

In England, the Minister of Defence sits with his feet up on his desk, music blaring from speakers, his hand idly tapping against the arm of his chair. He’s tapping a four-beat rhythm that doesn’t match the music, doesn’t change and doesn’t ever stop.

All at once, he sits up, eyes on a screen in front of him as the music cuts out. He looks at the webpage that’s just gone up.

It’s a sound bite, just a few seconds, on a loop. A four-beat rhythm.

There’s also a question.

__

Who’s the drummer?

He smiles. This, he thinks, is going to be fun. 


	2. Chapter Two

Apparently, several groups of demons are attacking people all over Cleveland. This is unusual, Illyria is told, not only because some of these demons are more likely to attack each other than attack humans, but because they’re using some kind of high-tech weapons. Most demons don’t use anything more high-tech than a gun, and even that is rare.

Illyria knows all of this because Willow came in to tell her. She wonders if she should be flattered that Willow thinks she’s capable of organising something like this after having access a laptop for less than half an hour. She decides that she isn’t – if she was going to launch an attack of this nature, she would make sure that no suspicion fell on her. To do otherwise would simply be inefficient.

So she tells the truth, and denies everything. The bristling Slayer who stands just behind Willow obviously doesn’t believe her, and says as much. Illyria suspects that she was one of the Slayers that attacked her when she took the phone, several days earlier. She makes a note of her face, because it seems likely that she’ll cause problems later. If a potential threat is recognised before it becomes a threat, then she can take steps to make sure that the threat is never actualised.

Willow believes her, though. She leaves, already telling the Slayer to take a team and deal with one of the groups of the demons. Illyria listens, and learns that almost all of the Slayers in Cleveland are required to deal with this, especially given the likelihood that this is all a smokescreen to cover for an attack on the Hellmouth.

As it turns out, they are almost correct in this regard. It is a smokescreen.

Illyria learns this when she hears a high-pitched whining sound, and a thud. She hears people moving around. They aren’t Slayers – she can tell that by the way they walk, their footsteps are far too heavy – but they still seem to know where they’re going. There are a handful of shots, so quiet that Illyria barely hears them, and she realises that there are now no Slayers in the building. At least, none that are alive.

She smiles. Finally.

She turns, and isn’t surprised to see that the door to her room is open, although there was no squeal of disused hinges.

There is a man leaning in the doorway, and he isn’t at all what Illyria expected.

For one thing, he appears to be human. He’s wearing an immaculately tailored suit.

For another, he’s quite clearly _not_ human. She can hear his hearts beating, a four-beat rhythm that’s perfectly in time with the drumming. But, even without that, she would never mistake him for human. To her, he looks less human than she does, even with her patches of blue skin and her icy blue eyes. Around him, time fractures – she, who always, always knows what time it is, sees past-present-future swirling around him, confused and changing constantly. She can see it in his eyes, the look not only of someone who’s seen time but of someone who’s been seen _by_ time.

For his part, he’s looking at her as though she’s a new toy that he hasn’t had a chance to work out yet.

“What are you?”

The words hit her like a blow. It isn’t just his voice – he sounds English, although she suspects that it would probably be more accurate to say that English sounds like him. It’s the words themselves. He doesn’t know her. She’s fallen so far that this one, this man around whom time breaks like silence before the four-beat rhythm, doesn’t even know who she is. That hurts, hurts so much that the pain is almost physical.

“I ran a scan of the building, a while ago.” He continues, not waiting for her to speak. “Full of humans – or Slayers, which I suppose is the next worst thing. Then there’s you. Scan says you’re human. Except for the fact that you’re barely above room temperature, all your organs seem to be liquefied, and your skin is significantly harder than a human’s really should be.”

Illyria tilts her head, looking at him intently. “Why don’t you tell me who I am?”

He smirks, pushing himself upright and putting his hands in his pockets. “I know what people _say_ you are. Old One, they say. Deeper Well, they say. They call you a God. There are people who worship you. I know what people say you are. But I’m not asking _them_ \- what _they_ say isn’t worth the breath they use to say it. I’m asking _you_.”

“I am Illyria.” She says. It’s true. The only true answer she could give to the question. Anything else would only tell him what she was, and she simply cannot bear to tell him about that, not while she stands there in a dusty room in a human shell while he stands there with eternity sparkling in his eyes.

He nods, as though he had expected nothing more. “So. As long as we’re playing this game... why don’t you tell me who _I_ am?”

“You aren’t human, though you look it, and all the people you brought into this building are. You have two hearts, and you’ve taken your heartbeat and spread it around the world so that your hearts beat in the subconscious of every living thing on the planet. Time frolics around you like an excited puppy. You’re the man who’s armed several different species and sent them rampaging around Cleveland, even though they’d rather be ripping each other to shreds. You’re the man who’s going to rule the world.”

He grins widely, and Illyria thinks that it’s the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen. “Who are you?”

“My name...” He bounces excitedly on the balls of his feet. “My name is the Master, and I’m a Time Lord.”

Illyria considers this for a long moment. “Yes.” She says simply. There is nothing more that needs to be said.

“You hear it, don’t you? The drumming. You hear it.”

For a moment, she is about to answer, about to tell him that of course she hears it, and it sounds _glorious_ , but she hesitates. She realises, in that moment, that she isn’t talking about the same drumming that he’s talking about. Because she hears it in the phones, she hears it thanks to Archangel, but his expression is far too eager to be talking about that, and he’s bouncing in place to the time of the rhythm and she is sure that he doesn’t even realise what he’s doing. “I hear Archangel.”

For a moment, just a moment, he looks disappointed, but then he tilts his head and looks at her and it’s back to him trying to work her out. “I was careful. Very careful. No one on this planet should be able to hear it. No one. But you hear it. You heard it, and it didn’t matter to you that not only should it not be possible to hear, but you shouldn’t even be able to pay attention to it. Definitely not enough attention to make a website about it.”

“I am Illyria.” She says simply, as though that was the only explanation required. And it is.

“So, what are you, Illyria? I was thinking some kind of higher dimensional being, but that isn’t the kind of thing that the Slayers would keep as a pet.”

Her body does not tense. Her hands do not clench into fists, and her voice, when it comes, is not angry. It’s simply matter-of-fact, the same flat tone that she’s been using this entire time. “I am not a pet.”

“Ooh. That got a rise. That’s interesting.” The Master said with a grin. “Old One, hmm? Thing is, if an Old One was here, really here, in the flesh, then I wouldn’t be here. Archangel wouldn’t even have gotten off the ground.” He chuckles. “Because if you were an Old One, you’d be ruling. Or maybe off doing something incomprehensible in a different dimension, of course, but... they worship you. The humans. So... an Old One, stuck in the body of a human.” He claps his hands together. “That’s good, isn’t it? Isn’t that good?” 

“I was a being of power, once.” Illyria said, and even now, even after all this time, she can’t keep the bitterness out of her voice. She can’t stop it, just as she can’t help but feel ashamed. “Now I am not.”

“Well... I wouldn’t say that. You heard the drumming. And you can see... what was it? Ah, time frolicking around me like a puppy. That’s more than anyone else on this planet can say.” He steps closer. “But, see... the thing is, I’ve killed quite a few Slayers to get here and have this conversation. Made some promises to some rather unpleasant fellows. Course, I’m not going to keep those promises, but... well, you get the point. Made an investment in you, you might say.”

He steps closer again, and when he speaks this time he isn’t speaking English. He’s speaking a language so old that there are no records of it, so old that even its name is forgotten. Languages derived from it have gone extinct and been forgotten in their turn. There is only one person on the planet who knows it.

Or so Illyria had thought. Apparently, she’d been half right.

“I did my research, Illyria. I know your history. I know where you come from, what you are. I know that time itself used to bow before you. This world will kneel before me, in time. My name will be on everyone’s lips. But you know that already. You know exactly what I’m doing. You can stop it before it even begins, marshal the Slayers and UNIT and everyone else against me. So here and now, you have a choice. You can die, die a real death. Or you can join me. You can rule again, at my side. So what do you say? Yes or no?”

She smiles. She knows a lie when she hears it. But it’s such a pretty lie. Besides, if she can recognise a potential threat before it actually becomes a threat, she can make sure the threat is never actualised.

“Yes.”


	3. Chapter Three

The Master opens the car door for her.

At first, Illyria doesn’t think anything about it. She’s noticed that it’s something that humans do. It doesn’t seem to matter that they know that she _isn’t_ human, that the only reason she’s female at all is because her shell was chosen for her. They do it anyway.

But the Master isn’t human. Not at all.

So Illyria looks at him coolly. She won’t be treated like a human, not anymore. Not if she doesn’t have to.

The Master just looks at her, grinning, and doesn’t move at all. “I have all day, you know.”

“The Slayers will be back, eventually.”

“That’s true. What they’ll find is a few dead girls scattered around their headquarters, and _you_ , walking around. Then I’ll tell them something, and they’ll believe it. They’ll believe anything I say.” His grin widens. “You know that.”

Illyria thinks it over. She contemplates pointing out that there is nothing to stop her from leaving, but she knows that isn’t true and she knows that the Master would think less of her if she even brought it up. She also thinks about pointing out that she could snap him like a twig, Time Lord or not, but they both know that there’s no way that she’s going to do that so there’s no point even bringing it up.

Instead, she simply gets in the car. It makes sense that someone calling themselves ‘the Master’ would have control issues. She doesn’t have a problem with that. If he underestimates her, then that’s all to her advantage.

When she’s inside, he laughs like an excited child and holds out his hand.

Illyria isn’t surprised to see that it isn’t empty.

She _is_ surprised to see that he's holding a Christmas cracker, though.

“Oh, don’t look at me like that.” The Master pouts. Illyria is perfectly aware that she had no expression on her face whatsoever. “I know it’s not Christmas, but it’s a human festival anyway so who cares when it is? Besides, I have a present for you.”

Illyria wonders what kind of present one could possibly find in a Christmas cracker that someone like the Master would consider a gift. She pulls it. It acts exactly as a cracker should, and pops. The majority comes away in her hand.

“Go on.” The Master said. “Look inside!”

She does.

She also realises that she was wrong. There is a very real possibility that she’s going to tear the Master apart.

Because what’s inside is a blue paper crown.

Illyria moves fast, she knows she does, but the Master is already moving before she’s even begun, and there are a dozen guns pointed at her before she can close the distance between them. She isn’t concerned about them – her skin is tough, and besides, she has no vital organs to injure. She’s more concerned by the fact that the Master, who knows who she is and what she can do, is still grinning. “Come on, don’t be like that! It’s just a piece of paper.”

Illyria says nothing, but slowly and calmly shreds the Christmas cracker with the crown still inside it. She doesn’t look at what she’s doing, doesn’t look at the gunmen. She doesn’t take her eyes off the Master the entire time.

“Well, you’re no fun.”

“No.” Illyria drops the shredded bits of paper and card. “No, I’m not.”

“No wonder you got yourself killed, being a spoilsport like that.” The Master grumbled. Then he moved past Illyria as though she wasn’t even there, and slid into the car. “You getting in or not? Your present isn’t going to last forever, you know.”

Illyria looks at the gunmen, who have now lowered their guns and are filing into their own van. She looks back at the Master, who’s sitting and kicking absent-mindedly against the driver’s seat, and thinks that this was some kind of test.

She hasn’t got a clue whether she’s passed or not.

~*~

Apparently, the Master has a private jet. She knows this because the Master tells her, gesturing to it with a disgusted expression on his face. “Look at it. This is supposed to be the height of luxury. It can’t even stay up! It needs to land to refuel, can’t even make it around the planet! And humans are so proud of them!”

Illyria mulls this over. “Then why do you have one?” There are faster ways to travel, she knows.

“Needs must.” The Master says lightly, and strides up to the jet. Illyria has the distinct impression that he’s avoiding the issue, that there’s something important about this, but she just doesn’t know what it is.

She follows the Master onto the plane. He gestures grandly. “Ta-da! Your present, your Majesty!”

The present is almost enough for Illyria not to notice the insult, but not quite. She doesn’t react, however, because she’s too busy examining her gift.

It’s Rupert Giles. He’s sitting in a seat, although it looks like he would really rather not be sitting there but would rather be somewhere else, preferably right in front of the Master with a sword in his hand. He doesn’t say anything, although he does glare fiercely at Illyria. She suspects that his silent, immobile state has something to do with the metal collar around his neck. It has a blinking light on it.

“It’s a bomb.” The Master supplied helpfully. “If he gets up, or says anything...” He makes a noise like an explosion. “No more Rupert. Also no more of most of Cleveland. And the Slayers will get blamed for it too.”

“That would kill you too.” Illyria comments.

“Certainly looks that way, doesn’t it?”

Illyria nods. It is an exquisite cage, and she would expect nothing less. “Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why him?”

The Master shrugs. “Why not him?”

“Out of everyone I know, he is the least of a threat. You clearly have some ulterior motive, in offering him to me. Why him?”

“Ooh, aren’t we clever? I could tell you that he handles most of the administration for the Slayers, and that killing him would not only send them a message but also make it that much more difficult for them to get organised. I could say that. It even sounds true.” The Master pauses. “Yes. Yes, I think I’ll say that.”

“Deactivate the bomb.”

“Oh, that thing? Doesn’t actually do anything.” The Master looks very proud of himself. “It’s just pretty.”

Giles surges to his feet and rushes at the Master, screaming obscenities.

Illyria holds out a hand, palm outwards. Giles crashes into it, and even though he is bigger than Illyria, heavier, he stops dead with the air driven out of his lungs, and Illyria’s arm doesn’t so much as bend.

She moves forward. She doesn’t appear to be moving quickly, but she has Giles against the wall of the jet before he has a chance to draw in another breath. She increases the pressure – not enough to crack his ribs, but enough that he’ll have trouble breathing. He plucks ineffectually at her wrist, trying to loosen her grip and failing miserably.

“I gave you a chance.” Illyria said, her voice low. She rarely has any emotion in her voice – or, at least, any emotion other than disdain – but now she sounds _angry_ , rage dripping from every syllable. “I gave you a plan. I showed you exactly how the Slayers could win the war. How they could make it so that there are no more demons attacks, that demons won’t even be able to _think_ about attacking. But you said no. You said that wasn’t the way you did things. You’re too small. All of you. You think that you’re fighting a series of battles, and you can’t see that you’re fighting a war. One day, you’re going to lose a battle, and with it the war. And your planet. And you’re going to wish that you listened to me.”

Giles leans forward, and in a harsh, rasping voice, he says “We’ll stop you.”

Then Illyria puts her hand through his chest, and he doesn’t say anything after that.

“Well.” The Master says, after a few moments. “That was intense.”


	4. Chapter Four

Fred had been scared of flying. She had always tried to drive instead, if she could. If she had been here, she would have been fidgeting, trying to find something to take her mind off the fact that there wasn’t all that much between her and thousands and thousands of feet of empty air.

She certainly would have asked the Master what he was doing. Both because she’d be curious and she was always the sort of person who would try and find out more about whatever was making her curious, and because talking might distract her from her current position.

But Illyria isn’t Fred. She isn’t afraid of flying. She doesn’t fidget. Nor does she ask what the Master what he’s doing.

The reason that she doesn’t ask isn’t because she isn’t Fred. She knows that a human would ask, that the Master probably expects her to ask, but her reason for not asking isn’t because she doesn’t want to act like a human. She knows she isn’t. She knows she doesn’t think like one, doesn’t act like one. She doesn’t need to prove that to herself.

It isn’t because she doesn’t care, either. If the Master had been anyone else, she wouldn’t have paid him any attention whatsoever. Anything he did would be so far below her that it would be like her taking an interest in the action of ants. But he’s probably the closest thing that Illyria can have to a peer, and ultimately, _that_ is why she doesn’t ask.

Because she _does_ care. Not just about what he’s doing, but what he’ll think about her for asking. She should know. She should be able to figure it out. She shouldn’t have to ask, as though it’s a puzzle that she hasn’t solved, because it shouldn’t _be_ a puzzle. She isn’t going to admit that it is.

So she doesn’t ask. She doesn’t watch him, either.

For his part, he seems to have forgotten that she’s there. She might think that he’s entirely focused on whatever human music that he’s listening to, if it isn’t for the fact that he’s looking intently at a blank piece of paper in front of him, twirling a pen between his fingers. He hasn’t written anything. He hasn’t even uncapped the pen. He just looks at the paper. Every so often, he sets aside a sheet and takes out a new one, which he then proceeds to look at. There is no pattern that Illyria can discern. He just looks at it. He doesn’t stare – sometimes he looks out of the window for extended periods of time, or straight ahead, but he always returns his attention to the paper.

She doesn’t know what he’s doing, and at this point, she’s too proud to ask.

After a few hours, the Master looks satisfied, and then puts the pieces of paper away. While he does so, he says “Why?”

At first, Illyria isn’t sure that he’s even talking to her. He isn’t looking at her, hasn’t said a single word to her since the plane took off. But there’s no one else there – certainly no one else who could hear him, given his quiet voice, the dull roar of the engine, and the fact that it seems like he’s addressing a briefcase.

“Why what?”

He turns to face her, and for the first time his voice is devoid of any trace of humour. “You gave them a plan to take over the world. Why?”

Illyria is surprised. Firstly, because he’s asking in the first place. If he’s anything like she is – and she knows he is – then he’ll have thought the same thing she did, that admitting that he doesn’t know something, that he can’t work it out, is shameful.

But, even more than that, she’s surprised at herself, for her reaction to the question. She would have expected herself to be proud, to feel like she’s won something. But she doesn’t.

Because, yes, he admitted that he didn’t know something. But it’s not some trivial thing, like it would be if she asked him why he’d just spent hours looking at blank pieces of paper. When he asks why, it isn’t the same why that the Slayers had asked when she’d first presented the plan. Their why had just highlighted the fact that she was alien, that she didn’t think the same way they did.

His question wasn’t rhetorical. He wasn’t asking why she’d come up with the plan in first place – he knew that all too well. He was asking why she’d given it to them, rather than just implementing it in the first place so that, by the time anyone knew what she was doing, it would be too late for them to do anything about it. He’s asking because, if he gets an answer, he’ll know about a mistake that she made, and he’ll be able to avoid it.

That, she thinks, is something worth losing a little pride for.

Her lips curl into a slight smirk, to give the impression that she thinks that she’s won something, to make him think that, in some small way, this makes up for his stunt with the paper crown. She isn’t sure if her deception is successful – his face remains blank – but, for her, it’s worthwhile nonetheless.

It takes her some to answer. For a while, she isn’t even sure if she’s going to answer at all, and the words, when they come, take her almost by surprise.

“I thought, for a long time, that humans were cleverer than I was. That they were playing some kind of long game so complicated that I couldn’t even begin to understand it – a game so complicated that it looked as though they weren’t playing at all, as if they really were reeling from one catastrophe to another. It was impossible for me to believe that the dominant species of the planet could be as stupid as they are and survive.”

The Master snorts, and for a brief moment Illyria thinks that he’s laughing at her and stops speaking, but it looks more like she’s made a joke that only he understands – he’s not laughing at her, not at something she said, but at something that’s in response to what she said, some private joke that’s meaningless to her.

Even so, she stops talking long enough for him to respond. “They had help.”

Illyria doesn’t ask what he means by this – she assumes that he doesn’t mean the Slayer, because she knows that not even one of them would be capable of stopping humanity from getting wiped out, not if humans really were as stupid as they seemed. She would quite like to know what he’s talking about, but she doesn’t want to admit it.

“Eventually, I realised that they really were as small as I thought they were.” Illyria continues. “That they just can’t wrap their tiny minds around the scale of the war they’re fighting. They have power, resources, influence – they could end the war in less than a year, end it so thoroughly that there’d never be another. I thought they just needed someone to point out how.” Illyria pauses for a moment.

The Master sits back, satisfied. She can see that he thinks that he has the answer, now. That she realised that humans just aren’t worth the effort, that she retreated to her room and stood there, waiting for the world to change. Waited for someone like him.

But that’s not it.

That’s not it at all.

She turns away, doesn't continue, and there’s no smirk on her face, no expression at all.


	5. Chapter Five

“ _Twenty minutes to landing, Mister Saxon._ ”

Illyria looks at the Master quizzically. “Saxon?”

He shrugs. “Humans generally don’t like working for someone called ‘Master’. Well, I say that, but-”

She stops listening.

No. That isn’t quite right. She’s still listening, but there’s something in the way.

It takes her a while to figure out what it is - at first she thinks that it’s something wrong with the air itself, because it feels like it’s suddenly become thick, almost solid. But she moves a hand and everything seems normal. It’s not gravity, either - though she feels unnaturally heavy, when she stands there’s no more resistance than there is normally. Even so, she feels as though she’s rooted somehow, as though, despite the fact that she’s moving at hundreds of miles an hour, she should really be standing still.

In fact, she isn’t sure if she even does figure it out. There are two reasons for this.

The first is that time suddenly feels like it’s stopped making sense, as though the bizarre flickering of past-present-future around the Master has wrapped itself around the whole world and things which should be fixed have suddenly become untethered - except that that's wrong, because there is no _suddenly_ , there’s just an _always_. But that isn’t right, either, because it’s an _always_ that hasn’t happened yet. She isn’t sure if she works this out, because she feels as though she knows what’s wrong before she even realised that something _was_ wrong, even though she also remembers wondering what, exactly, _is_ wrong.

The second is because the answer feels like it’s literally being screamed at her, as though there’s something shouting in her head. There’s no words, no language, no _voice_ , but she feels it anyway - the scream of something which should be moving being forced to stand still, while the universe it should be moving through is forced to twist around it, until it breaks.

There’s a word for this, she knows. She can’t remember the last time she’s seen one - she suspects that the question doesn’t even make sense, but still, the word trips easily from her tongue.

“Paradox.”

She feels/didn’t feel/will feel a hand on her shoulder, and a mind grazes by her own, and the storm in her mind calms.

She moves faster than she ever has in this body, and has the Master up against the wall, hand around his throat and his feet dangling six inches above the ground. She tells herself that it’s because his mind had been able to reach hers - it shouldn’t be possible, she isn’t human, she has defences against that sort of thing, it shouldn’t even be possible to begin with, but she knows that isn’t why.

She feels like she’s been attacked. She feels like she did when she was first brought back, when the world made no sense and everything that she’d ever loved had died so long ago that there wasn’t even dust left. Things that she knew, things that were as certain and as solid as the universe itself, were suddenly gone.

As it turns out, the universe isn't quite as solid as she would like, either.

So she grips him by the throat and snarls “What did you do?” She tells herself that she’s asking him what he did with his mind, but that’s not it. That’s not it at all. He’d called himself Time Lord, and he had eternity sparkling in his eyes and she’d thought that he was like her, someone who could feel time running over his skin, someone who could move through time like most people moved through space. She’d thought that the coruscating past-present-future around him was just what a time traveller looked like to her now, with her vastly diminished senses. But now she knows that that isn’t true - it’s what someone who’s broken/is breaking/will break time looks like. 

He grins, seemingly unbothered by the fact that he’s dangling in the air. “It’s good, isn’t it? Isn’t it good?”

“What did you do?”

“You feel it, don’t you? The paradox. Hasn’t happened yet, but the probability lines are drawing in. Really enjoyed designing that part - reality matrices being what they are, the moment the probability of a paradox happening gets high enough, the paradox will happen regardless of whether it wasn’t going to happen right then. Generates a lot of power, that does. Enough to rip a hole in space and time.” His grin widens. “And they said a degree in cosmic science wouldn’t get me anywhere.”

Illyria stares at him, blankly. For the first time that she can remember, she isn’t sure what to say.

“Course, it shouldn’t be possible. I hid it - surprised even you can feel it, from this distance. But _they_ should have noticed it in a heartbeat. Should have swooped in and stopped me. But they aren’t there. An empire of ten million years and they’re just _gone_. I can’t feel them. There’s just the drumming. The never-ending drums.”

She isn’t sure if it’s an echo of his mind brushing hers, but she feels the loneliness rolling off him in waves, so strong that it’s almost tangible.

She realises, then, that she’d underestimated him. She’d heard his four-beat rhythm, heard what it was doing, heard it saying _listen-trust-worship-obey_ , and she’d heard glory pounding behind every beat. She’d met him, a man who was willing to act in a world where everyone reacted, a man to whom no reaction was possible because Archangel would sweep that all away, a man who was going to rule the world, and she’d followed him. How could she not? He had all of time shimmering in his eyes. He’d given her a paper crown and she’d thought it was a test, to see how she’d react, but she’d been wrong. It hadn’t been a test, at least not one that she could pass - it had just been him testing her limits, testing how far he could go before she snapped.

She’d thought that he’s the man who’s going to rule the world, but that isn’t quite right.

He’s the one who was going to break it. He’s the one who’s going to keep pushing and pushing until it snaps and it can’t be fixed.

Then the plane lands, and she puts him down. He flashes a smile at her, and moves to the door as though nothing had happened. He looks over his shoulder at her when he realises that she hasn’t followed. “Don’t you want to see it?”

“See what?” Illyria replies dully.

“The paradox machine, of course.”

~*~

He tells her all sorts of details about his machine as they drive. If he notices that she isn’t listening, he doesn’t appear to care. She certainly doesn’t. She knows what he’s doing - it doesn’t matter to her if he’s doing it with a machine, or if he was doing it like she would, if she still had the power. A paradox is still a paradox.

She doesn’t ask where they’re going, either. She cares even less about that.

They stop in front of a building, and the Master stops talking and looks at Illyria critically. It’s the first time that he’s looked at her as though she was something other than a toy or some kind of puzzle. It is the kind of look that, if she was Fred, would make her deeply uncomfortable.

“They won’t let you in looking like that.”

It occurs to her that none of the people working for the Master had even blinked at her appearance. It makes Illyria feel better to know that he still has to associate with ordinary people who’ve never seen someone like her before.

She looks down at herself, and when she looks back up there is no blue in her hair, no blue patches on her skin. Her skintight body armour is gone, replaced by clothing which Fred’s memories suggest is the female equivalent of the Master’s suit.

She keeps her eyes blue, although she takes care to make sure that they aren’t the inhuman, icy blue they normally are. She knows that they don’t fit her colouring, but that doesn’t matter. Even if she looks human, she needs the Master to know that she isn’t.

The Master nods. “That works.”

There are guards, security check points that the Master walks through effortlessly, only pausing to say “She’s with me.” No one questions this, no one looks at her twice, and she thinks this is what Archangel is doing _now_. She wonders what it’ll be like when his machine is ready and the paradox is set in stone.

There is an office, which she barely sees. He says something to her, she hears something about ‘Ministry’ and ‘elect’, but in that moment she couldn’t care less about what he’s saying.

All she cares about is the blue box, sitting in the corner. It looks like it’s made out of wood, but it quite clearly isn’t. It isn’t like anything that Illyria’s seen before.

For one thing, it’s feels _solid_. Even from where she stands, not touching it, Illyria can feel the age radiating from it - it feels ancient, in a way that nothing she’s encountered in this shell has, not even the Master. It feels like all of time could beat on it’s doors and it wouldn’t move so much as an inch, wouldn’t even notice. But even so, it feels like something which should move, which wants to move, something which should always be moving, and she hears it again - quieter than before, but still there, a distant screaming, echoing in the back of her mind.

Then the Master opens the box’s doors, and Illyria feels like she’s been hit by the whole universe at once. She feels a deep, roiling pain in her gut, a sense of overwhelming dread knotting the place where her stomach should be as something batters against her mind, and she is shocked that the building is still standing, that there are still humans scurrying around - can’t they feel it? How are they still alive? How can things as small as they are survive something like this?


	6. Chapter Six

It is, Illyria thinks, a question of volume. 

This thing that looks like a blue wooden box, this thing that’s filled with machinery and ominous red light, this _paradox machine_ \- whatever it is, it’s loud. She’d heard it, _felt_ it, from miles away. The Master had said he’d hidden it, but obviously not well enough. Not from her. Obviously whatever he did is enough for him - he’s standing inside the machine, seemingly unphased, and she _knows_ that he is temporally aware, at the very least. They share at least some of the same senses.

But there is nothing like her on the planet. At least, nothing alive. Whatever the Master has done to keep the machine quiet, it isn’t enough. Not to keep it from her.

It’s like Archangel. She heard that - still hears it now, even though she feels barely aware enough to register it. That shouldn’t be possible. The signal hid itself, told everyone that they didn’t hear it. But Illyria does. She is the only one that does.

As she stands there, Illyria wonders if she should lower the volume again. She thinks she knows what the Master did, when he grazed by her mind on the plane. She is fairly sure that she could do it, and then she could walk inside the machine and it could scream wordlessly to no one at all.

But she isn’t sure whether she should.

She knows why she should. Standing here, with a paradox ticking away, gradually coming closer to actualisation, is the first time that she’s felt pain, actual _physical_ pain. Though she stands there with no expression on her face, no tension in her limbs, it is all that she can do to avoid falling to her knees, to avoid curling into a ball and hoping that the world will go away. It’s all she can do not to run away.

But there’s power, here. Power like nothing she’s felt before, not in this shell. She doesn’t want to give it up - even though she’s weak, and this is almost more than she can take, even though she doesn’t know if she could use any of it without dying, without burning herself away and exploding like she almost had in LA all those years ago. She’s been weak for so long, and she knows that when the Sun dies and this solar system is nothing but dust she’d still be weak. She tells herself that, if she can draw in just a little bit of this power, if she can work out how to do that, then there’s nothing in the universe that can stop her.

This is true.

But the real reason that she doesn’t want to shut it out is because it makes her feel _alive_.

She’s spent years standing motionless in a room, planning, scheming, calculating. Then there’d been Archangel and the Master and, for the first time, she’d thought that there was something on this planet that was worth her attention. But all of that is just something to do. A diversion for someone who never sleeps, can never sleep. It is, at best, an amusement.

But this? This is so much more.

She smiles. Though she has a human face and human eyes and human skin, no one who sees that smile would ever mistake it for human. She smiles, teeth bared, and then she says “Shut up.”

The Master stops talking. Illyria hadn’t even noticed that he had been - compared to the majesty and power of this machine, he’s barely even worth her time.

Truthfully, she doesn’t notice that he stopped, either. Because, just for a moment, the screaming in her head stops. Just for a second - less even than that. The silence lasts for so short a time that even Illyria has difficulty registering the brief flicker of soundlessness. But she does. The feeling of triumph, in that moment, is similar to how she used to feel when she conquered whole dimensions.

The Master’s eyes narrow. “What did you say?”

Illyria focuses on him. She wonders if this is what happiness feels like. “I wasn’t talking to you.”

Then she moves forward, and though she feels like the entire universe is rattling around in her skull, as though her bones are liquid and her skin is crumbling away, there is no indication that she finds it difficult at all. “Tell me. What is it? What was it, before you took it apart, before you started torturing it?”

The Master doesn’t reply. Illyria turns to see him standing by the door, looking at her with a blank expression while he tap-tap-tap-taps on a nearby strut. 

She says nothing more. She doesn’t have to - her body language says it for her. _Well?_

He still doesn’t reply. Doesn’t react at all.

Therefore, Illyria has no idea why the screaming in her head stops, or the paradox quietens.

He slips out of the door and closes it behind him before Illyria has time to adjust to the sudden change.

She stares at the door for a long time after he’s gone.

Then she looks around the room. “Don’t suppose you’re going to tell me?” There’s no reply, not even a hint that she was heard. “No, I didn’t think so.”

After a few moments, she turns and makes her way deeper into the machine.

~*~

The paradox isn’t quite as painful as it was earlier - it seems as though it’s progress has been reversed, at least a little bit, although Illyria can’t imagine why the Master would have voluntarily set back his plans like that. She has no doubt, however, that it was his doing. But it’s still there. Every step that Illyria takes is like a line of fire shooting up from her feet to her skull.

There are some other effects, as well.

Illyria is well aware that ghosts exist. Fred had met both Pavayne and Spike, before he’d been recorporealised. She hasn’t seen any since becoming Illyria, however.

She isn’t entirely sure if this is still the case.

She sees… _them_. She isn’t sure if they’re ghosts. She thinks that it might be more accurate to say that she is.

They are moments in time - people talking, laughing, panicking. She hears snatches of words, arguments, shouts. Moments that happened long ago that are reappearing now, snatches of memories pulled from time before it breaks. She moves through them, slowly, and they burst apart like dandelion seeds in the wind. Although they are moments that are dead and gone, which have no business still being here, it’s she who feels like the ghost. She feels like an intruder, someone watching moments that are more real, more corporeal than she is.

She knows that she isn’t being shown this. Whatever mind this machine has, whatever sentience it possesses, none of it has elected to share these moments with her. She’s forcing herself into somewhere she isn’t wanted. This is some kind of memory storage, she thinks, a dying, tortured machine looking through it’s memories looking for some kind of comfort. It can’t keep her out, can’t stop her as she moves slowly deeper, can’t fight at all - the best it can do is try to be somewhere, some _when_ else.

Illyria only sees the moments because she is Illyria, because, even now, there is no trick of time that she doesn’t know, that she can’t see through. These moments aren’t for her - she just moves through them, a spirit from another time.

She doesn't have to wonder what she would do, if the situations were reversed. If some tiny being walked through her memories, while she was forced to just lie there and do nothing. She knows exactly what she would do - nothing, nothing at all, because there’s nothing that can be done. She would hate every moment of it, hate the thing crawling through her mind, hate herself for being unable to do anything about.

She knows this. Even so, she doesn’t stop. She can’t bring herself to stop.

So she walks, every movement painful, while lost moments shatter around her.


	7. Chapter Seven

The machine is interesting. For one thing, it’s enormous. Illyria had known that it was bigger than its outside would suggest the moment that she’d seen it, before it had even been opened, but as she walks through it she finds that it’s even bigger than she would have thought. Illyria had worked out almost immediately that it’s bigger than the building it’s sitting in, but now she sees that it’s probably bigger than the entire city.

It also has some kind of capacity to change the location of the rooms within it. Illyria knows this, because she keeps finding herself in a room containing a pool. She’s walked through many, _many_ rooms, and this is the only one that keeps recurring. It’s connected to rooms that it really shouldn’t be. Illyria suspects that, if the machine was in better condition, if it wasn’t being torn apart to fuel a paradox, then it could probably make sure that she never left the pool at all.

She knows why the machine wants her in the pool room. It has fewer memories than any other room she’s found – just a couple of people hiding in it, and someone who plummets into it as though from a great height – a greater height than should be possible, given the height of the ceiling.

Illyria knows that she’s hurting the machine, that her mere presence is an additional agony over and above the paradox tearing at its core. She knows that the machine is trying to corral her, make sure that she’s stuck somewhere where she can do the least damage – it knows that it has no chance of making her leave altogether. The kind thing to do would just be to stop, to sit beneath the water where there are so few memories, and leave the machine to its precious past.

She knows, without a doubt, that that’s what almost everyone she knows would do in this situation. Or, rather, it isn’t – they’d try to help the machine, this harmless sentient machine which is being tortured to breaking point by someone who’s quite clearly ‘evil’.

Illyria _could_ help the machine, she knows. The Master has left her here all alone, and though she doesn’t understand the machinery involved – it’s far beyond anything that Fred had ever encountered, and Illyria had never needed such a thing, not at the height of her power – she knows that she can reach out and help, share the burden. 

But Illyria isn’t like them.

She could say that she doesn’t help because she knows that it wouldn’t do any good – Illyria knows that chances are high that anything she does to Master’s machinery will just make everything worse - but, more than that, it would only be it would be palliative care at best, and that’s just not worth the effort.

She could say that that’s probably the Master’s plan – that the reason he left her here was because he was hoping that some shred of empathy would drive her to help, so that he could spring some kind of trap. Maybe he’s hoping that he can force the only other person who’s even slightly temporally aware into helping his paradox come to fruition. Maybe he wants her power (such as it is) to be used to fuel the machine. It’s the only explanation that she can come up with for why the Master is acting like this. In any case, Illyria’s never really understood the concept of empathy, and besides, she has no soul. No one thinks like she does, not even vampires, and she knows that it isn’t worth it to try and feel like them. That way lies only incomprehension and pain.

But, even though that’s true, that isn’t why she keeps walking. None of that explains why she wouldn’t just stop by the pool or, better yet, leave altogether.

It’s because she knows what it is to be powerless, weak, helpless. To be made so much less than what she once was that, should she be face to face with herself in her prime, she’d lack the senses to even recognise what she was seeing. To be cracked, twisted, broken. She knows exactly what it’s like.

And it makes her happier than she can say to be on the other side of that, to be the one watching the powerless creature squirm. She, who has ruled worlds, galaxies, dimensions, has spent so long being _nothing_ , just a shell in a room covered in dust. She has schemed, plotted and planned for this moment, the moment when she can finally take back some measure of power. And she is going to savour every moment of it, no matter how much it hurts her.

So Illyria walks. Though Illyria will never be known for her emotional demonstrations, even she cannot keep the enormous smile from her face.

~*~

Eventually, it’s time to leave. Though Illyria could have wandered through the machine for an eternity, it has finally mustered enough power so that the only rooms she can visit are the console room and the pool. As interesting as it is to watch the machine’s memories of more than a dozen doctors, of Susan and River and countless others, she supposes that she should leave. For the first time in her life, Illyria isn’t sure what time it is – being in the heart of a paradox machine is enough to overwhelm her fragile senses. She supposes that it isn’t a good idea to be apart from the Master for too long, lest he prepare some kind of trap for her. Besides, as painful as her presence is for the machine, it hurts her too. So, after a time that Illyria supposes might be considered ‘long’, she leaves.

Illyria isn’t the kind of person given to expectations. She’s never really seen the point – either they’re met, in which case you might as well not have had them at all, or they aren’t, in which case the surprise can be actively dangerous. But if she had been, she might have expected that there would be a trap waiting for her on the other side of the doors – either that, or nothing whatsoever. She thinks that she knows the Master well enough to know that there would be no middle ground.

If this is a trap, however, it’s either monstrously unsuccessful or not aimed at her at all.

The Master isn’t alone in the room. There’s a blonde human woman in there with him, and the only word that Illyria can think to describe them is _intertwined_. They’re kissing each other with something that looks very much like passion – he has his hands in her hair, her body is crushed against his and she clings to him as though he’s the only solid thing in a universe cast adrift. On her part, the kiss is certainly passionate – she doesn’t seem to have noticed that Illyria is there at all, and she seems intent on getting the Master’s jacket off without breaking the kiss. Illyria can see the heat radiating off of her, raw desire spangling off in waves.

The Master, however, has almost certainly realised that Illyria is there – she strongly suspects that a large part of this is for her benefit, although she cannot begin to imagine what possible agenda it serves. He’s approaching the kiss as though it’s some kind of puzzle, and although the blonde is clearly enjoying the results, Illyria can tell that for the Master the entire situation is entirely academic.

She briefly toys with the idea of interrupting, but she doesn’t think it’s worth the effort – besides, she knows that the human would only offer stammered apologies or explanations, and, after everything she’s been through, Illyria doesn’t think that she can lower herself to dealing with meaningless human chatter.

Illyria’s about to return to the machine, when she catches a glimpse of… _something_ , sitting on the Master’s desk. She is frankly astonished that she didn’t notice it before, a lapse which she can only attribute to the paradox raging at her back, and the fact that she is fairly sure that it wasn’t there before she went into the machine.

It looks as though the Master’s using it as some kind of paperweight, even though it’s really too large for that. It’s round, too, and Illyria is surprised that it hasn’t rolled away – or at least she would be, if it wasn’t for the fact that it quite clearly wasn’t a paperweight.

It’s a silver, metallic sphere, covered in markings which Illyria doesn’t recognise. She doesn’t recognise the metal, either, but that’s hardly surprising because she’s certain that it hasn’t even been discovered yet. She has no doubt whatsoever that it’s from the future – everything about it just screams that it’s out of its time. Beyond that, there’s a faint hum, just on the edge of her senses, as though it’s got some kind of electronics working away inside of it.

It’s also looking at her. Illyria isn’t quite sure how she knows this – it has no eyes, no visible means of seeing anything. Unlike the machine behind her, she senses no thought from it – to all intents and purposes, it’s just a metal, faintly humming sphere. But it’s a metal, faintly humming sphere that’s looking at her.

She glances back at the couple, calculating her chances of taking the sphere and leaving without the woman noticing. Fairly high, she thinks, even though the door is right next to wall the Master currently has her pressed up against. He seems to have her thoroughly occupied. She could do it – she’s fast, and she makes no sound when she moves.

But Illyria strongly suspects that the Master would stop what he was doing, if she did, and then she’d have to deal with his human on top of the fact that it looked like she was trying to steal a paperweight. She doesn’t think that she’s up to dealing with all of that – she’d much rather just knock the woman out, but she thinks the Master would probably be upset about that and he might send the sphere back to wherever it came from, and Illyria doesn’t want that, at least not until she’s had a chance to examine it.

So Illyria clears her throat.


	8. Chapter Eight

The blonde springs away from the Master, as Illyria had known she would. She straightens her hair, her clothes, rattles off countless apologies and also, Illyria notes, often presses her fingers to her lips as though she can keep the imprint of the Master’s touch there. She doesn’t appear to have realised that she’s standing between Illyria and the door, and that there’s no real way that Illyria could have gotten to where she is without the blonde noticing. The Master just grins at Illyria and, though he puts his jacket on properly, he makes no attempt to wipe away the lipstick on his mouth. 

After a few moments of this, which is a few moments more than she can stomach, Illyria smiles. She knows that she should try to make it a human smile, make it so there is some warmth in her eyes rather than a predatory smirk draped across her lips, but she doesn’t think that it’s worth the effort. She highly doubts that the blonde will notice anyway – she’s too wrapped up in the Master to notice anything, and even if she wasn’t there's still Archangel pulsing away in the back of her mind, telling her not to look at anything too closely. “May I borrow Saxon for a moment?”

“Ye-yes, of course.” The blonde stammers, blushing heavily. She turns to the Master. “I’ll see you later, Harry?” She murmurs, but she’s already half-way out of the door before he can even respond.

He does respond, however, and he does so by catching hold of her arm. She stops dead. “Say, Illyria. Have you met the girlfriend?”

“No.” Illyria said flatly, watching as the blonde comes back into the room to stand rather close to the Master.

As if on cue, the blonde extends a hand. “Lucy.”

Illyria doesn’t want to take it. She doesn’t want to defile herself by bringing her skin into contact with human flesh, especially not flesh that’s still humming from the attentions of someone so far above human that the blonde shouldn’t presume to even breathe the same air as him. But the Master has his games, and besides, he isn’t the only one who can play them. Illyria takes it, smiles warmly. She exaggerates her accent when she says “Charmed. I’m Illyria.” She isn’t surprised by the lack of reaction to hearing a pronounced Texan accent while standing in a British government building.

Lucy looks to the Master as though expecting some kind of prompt, but he’s just watching the entire situation. He hasn’t let go of her arm, however. “Do you work with Harry?”

“You could say that.” Illyria replies. “I’ve known him since he was young.”

Lucy is surprised by that, however, and though the Master gives no outward sign that anything is amiss, Illyria suspects that he, too, is surprised. “Really? Did you know him back in his college days? I always try to get him to talk about that, but all I get is the standard line, you know, the same stuff he feeds the papers…”

“Oh, yes. Of course, I’d never say that… _Harry_ was ever really young.” She flashes a smile at him, and it’s perfectly innocent and not at all triumphant. “He’s always been such an old soul, you’d never think he’s so young. We used to call him ‘Professor’.”

Lucy laughs. Illyria has the distinct impression that she's the kind of person who's used to laughing at things that aren’t really funny. “Oh, _really_. I never… Harry, you never told me that.”

The Master laughs, too, but it’s different from Lucy’s. _Point to you_ , it says. “That was a long time ago. Lifetimes. I was a different man then.” He presses a kiss to Lucy’s temple, and she melts against him. “Anyway, you’d best run along now.”

She blushes. “Yes, yes of course.”

She leaves, and the Master unabashedly watches her as she walks away. Though Lucy doesn’t turn around, Illyria can see that she knows he’s watching, and doesn’t mind. Doesn’t mind at all.

The moment that she’s gone, and the door’s closed, he turns to face Illyria. He looks amused. Illyria isn’t sure whether it’s genuine or not. “Professor?”

She shrugs. “If you want to shut me in a time machine, you shouldn’t be surprised if I learn a few things.”

He nods, as though that’s exactly what he expected. “Temporal echoes. Of course.”

“It’s not yours, though.”

He raises an eyebrow. “Excuse me?”

“I saw you, in there. Saw you change your face, switch from old to young in a hearts beat.” She smiles at him. “I saw you scream, as you changed. And I saw the other one. The one who calls themself the Doctor. There are so few memories of you, in there, but there are thousands of years of them. The machine is theirs, isn’t it?” She phrases it as a question, although she already knows the answer.

“No.” The Master says bluntly. “It’s mine. Mine by conquest. I took it and that makes it – theirs?” The Master tilts his head abruptly. “What do you mean, theirs?”

Illyria doesn’t reply. She isn’t sure what he means.

When the silence drags on for a few seconds, the Master’s expression becomes thunderous, and there’s a faint humming sound, as though some kind of machinery is coming online. It’s coming from the sphere on his desk.

Illyria gives no indication that she is aware of any of this. She just stands there impassively.

“Theirs?” He says again, and then suddenly his expression clears and beams at her, and the sphere quietens again. He bounces on his heels excitedly, one-two-three-four. “So! What did you think of it? My paradox machine?”

She isn’t quite sure how to respond to that. English doesn’t have the vocabulary to begin to describe what she feels, and while she could respond in her own ancient tongue she thinks, perhaps, that it’s just as ill-suited. At least in this case.

Instead, she merely taps against her leg, one-two-three-four. She keeps time with the sound of the Master’s hearts, which quicken in response. This, she thinks, is the reaction that Lucy had thought she was getting while she was kissing him.

In a burst of movement, he strides to his desk. He runs a hand along the top of the sphere, and Illyria is almost surprised that it doesn’t purr like a delighted cat. He tosses it to her easily, one-handed, as though it wasn’t the most valuable thing in the building.

Or, rather, the second-most valuable thing, Illyria reflects, while the machine screams endlessly in her head.

She catches it effortlessly, and she isn’t unduly surprised that physically touching it provides no greater insight into its nature. She is certain that there is some kind of machine inside the sphere, something connected to the Master’s mind, but she doesn’t know what it is. She doesn’t recognise the metal, so she doesn’t know if she can break through, but she doesn’t even try. If she were the Master, she’d arrange it so there’d be some kind of unpleasant gift ready for anyone who tried that.

She just looks at him, the future in one hand and a paradox raging at her back. She isn’t quizzical, but even so, there’s a question implicit in the way she stands.

He just grins at her, and she knows that whatever he’s suddenly so happy about, it isn’t enough for him to lower his guard and share with her. Instead, he’s just leaving her a puzzle. Illyria wonders if she even has enough information to solve it.

He extends a hand to her, waggling his fingers. “Come on. Time to go home.”

Illyria doesn’t take it. She knows the Master doesn’t expect her to. In any case, she’s touched too many people who are beneath her today.

Still, he leaves, and she follows.

~*~

The Master’s flat is much like Illyria's room, back in Cleveland. It has a bed, a sofa, bookshelves. None of them look like they’ve been used at all. The kitchen is pristine, untouched. She doesn’t look for food, but she highly doubts that she’d find any.

There is, however, a desk. It has several monitors on it – most of them are dark, but one of them has something that looks like a design for some kind of engine. It’s not one of the Master’s own designs, she knows. She’s seen the machine, she knows that the kinds of machines he can build are so far beyond anything on this planet that they would seem like magic.

She appreciates the view, however. Though this is the penthouse of a tall building, the view is from a much higher vantage point than one would expect. She can’t even see the humans scuttling around below, can’t see their cars or their buses or the endless litter they leave in their wake. Were it not for the fact that she can still hear them and their incessant chatter, she could almost pretend that she was back in the old days.

The Master comes and stands beside her, lips curled in a sneer. She knows that he’s thinking the same thing she is.

But still, with Archangel swirling all around them and the paradox ticking its way towards actualisation, she knows that soon all of this will be swept away.

“You know they can find me.” Illyria says, after a minute of looking down on London from a height befitting a god. “They’ve doubtlessly found the bodies by now, discovered that I’m gone. They might even have found Giles. A tracking spell isn’t difficult to put together.”

The Master snorts. “Magic. Do you really think I’d have left them alive, if I thought they were a threat? Your Willow couldn’t find her way out of a paper bag, not if I didn’t want her to. She won’t find you.”

She looks at him. She would like to ask what protections he has, but she can’t bring herself to do so. She knows that, if she was in his position, she wouldn’t even hint that they were there – she’d just let her enemies dash themselves against them in vain, not even knowing they existed.

But the Master, it seems, isn’t her. “Magic’s just manipulation of psychic energy, and I’ve got a psychic field wrapped around the whole planet.”

She nods, and doesn’t point out that the Council has more resources than simply magic at it’s disposal.

“Still, if you’re worried…” The Master continues.

Without waiting for a response, the view suddenly shifts. The window now seems to be where it should be. Illyria is disappointed. She had enjoyed being above, even for just a short while.

The Master nods at the building opposite them. “See the people in there?”

Illyria does. She sees the heat given off by the lights, the computers, the televisions, the people. She sees a young couple settling down to a candlelit dinner. She sees a child playing with a dog in its room, while a parent talks on the phone. She sees someone come home from work and collapse on their bed, too tired to even get undressed. She sees everyone. She always does.

The Master closes one eye and holds up a hand, thumb and forefinger extended. He looks at the building thoughtfully, and then he pinches his digits together.

Illyria can hear the screams from here, though they are only audible to human ears for a fraction of a second. She watches as the figures writhe in unendurable agony, scrabbling frantically at their skin as it pulls too tight, as their bones groan and their muscles contract to the point of snapping. She watches as they shrink.

She stands there watching even after the screaming has stopped, after all the heat signatures of everything living in the building have faded away.

“Why?” She says eventually. If she were someone else, she knows what the answer would be, but she already _knows_ that humans are small. She doesn’t need the Master to show her that, doesn’t need the Master to make it literally true. He doesn’t need to make a point to her. She can only suppose that there’s someone in the building he wanted dead, but it still seems like such a waste. All that power, just to kill a building of humans?

He grins at her, and makes a shooing gesture with one hand. “Why don’t you run along and find out?”


	9. Chapter Nine

The other building is less luxurious that the Master’s, but only marginally. The most noticeable difference is that there isn’t a doorman standing outside. Even so, Illyria can’t help but think that it won’t be long before someone notices that everyone in the building is dead. Besides whoever it is that the Master wanted dead, this _was_ a building full of people living there. All it would take is one of them to come home.

Illyria moves round the receptionist’s desk. She doesn’t bother to remove the contorted corpse from the chair, preferring instead to stand as she quickly brings up a list of everyone living in the building. It doesn’t take her long to find out who the Master’s target was. She recognises the name.

Riley Finn.

Illyria had only met Riley once, years ago. They hadn’t gotten along and, unlike most of the people that Illyria knew, it wasn’t because of a lack of trying on their part. He’d instinctively disliked her because she wasn’t human and refused to act like she was, and she’d barely even noticed his existence. She wonders if the Master had him killed just for her. It’s unlikely, she thinks.

She briefly contemplates taking the elevator, but she decides to take the stairs. At the very least, it will give her slightly more time to think as she climbs.

Riley had been part of an organisation that was separate from but allied to the Slayers. If one of them was attacked, then the other would retaliate on their behalf – and _both_ of them had been attacked, now that Riley and Giles were dead. Riley’s death had been showy and extravagant, with needless collateral damage and technology so far beyond human that the Slayers will almost certainly think it’s magic. Giles, meanwhile, had been killed by a hand pushed through his chest, which was about as low-tech as a death could be.

The Master had said that he had wanted Giles dead because he wanted to send the Slayers a message. Illyria had wondered why he would bother sending a message at all, why he wouldn’t just wipe them all out. Now she knows. It’s just misdirection, like the Archangel signal. He’s starting a war, with the Slayers and the Initiative and whatever other world-saving organisations are out there, so that none of them look too closely at him.

She wonders why he bothered. Archangel by itself is more than enough to keep away any unwanted attention. Anything else is just wasted resources and showing off.

When she reaches the door to Riley’s apartment, she realises that she doesn’t have to open it. She knows what she’ll find on the other side – a dead body, and probably some evidence pointing towards some other organisation. Perhaps UNIT – Illyria has never heard of them, but they must be fairly significant for the Master to mention them in the same breath as the Slayers. She doesn’t have to go in – she can just go back and tell the Master what she’s worked out.

But she doesn’t want to do that. That would make her feel too much like a dog, fetching answers on the Master’s whim and then running back to him to deposit the information at his feet, so that he can pet her and tell her that she’s so much smarter than all the other dogs that he’s just killed.

She knows that she could open the door with almost no effort, even if it is locked. If she so chose, she could walk through the wall – but she doesn’t want to do that, either.

It’s about time for Illyria to do something unexpected.

Illyria isn’t psychic – or at least, she isn’t psychic _now_. There had been a time when she had joyfully crushed the minds of her enemies, but that skill hadn’t survived when she’d been crammed into this tiny little shell. She was stuck here for eternity, just a mind trapped in a husk, unable to reach out.

But she doesn’t need to reach out. Everything she needs is there already, from the paradox howling away in the back of her mind all the way to the moment that the Master had shrunk every living thing in an entire building without so much as a push of a button. Illyria isn’t psychic, but _he_ is. He’s connected to the paradox, to Archangel, to his shrinking machine. She can’t reach out, but she doesn’t have to – the paradox is already in her head.

She feels tentatively for the connection, probing as gently as the fog rolling in.

She’s interrupted by the Master’s voice coming over the intercom – not because it took her by surprise, because she heard the system turn on in the fraction of a second before the Master spoke, but because she didn’t catch even a hint that the Master was going to speak. She's too slow, too unskilled. Though everything that she is hates to admit it, in this respect and _only_ this respect, the Master is better than she is.

“The door’s not locked, you know.” The Master says jovially. If he’s aware of what Illyria was doing, he gives no sign of it – but then, Illyria wouldn’t expect anything else from him.

So Illyria opens the door, takes in the scene. It is rather more domestic than she would have expected from Riley – there is the everyday clutter of an apartment that is lived in, and has been for some time, rather than just a temporary station.

She sees Riley’s dead body, and the technical blue prints of a futuristic gun on the table laid out in front of him. Sure enough, they bear the legend of ‘UNIT’ at the top of every page. Illyria remembers that Willow had accused her of organising some demons armed with guns like that.

She’s about to leave when she sees something thoroughly out of place.

It’s a teddy bear. Not a decorative teddy bear, of the sort that some humans collect, but one that looks like it belongs to a child. A child who loves it very much, judging from the wear. Definitely not something that one would expect to see in the apartment of a military man.

There is more than one room to the apartment. Illyria moves through it, until she finds what she’s looking for.

The body is female, and small even by the shrunken standards of the other corpses in the building. Judging by the rest of the room, she had been only a few years old.

Illyria hadn’t known that Riley had a daughter. She had known that he was married, but she hadn’t cared enough to learn the details and she’d never met his wife.

Well, if you want to start a war, killing the husband and child of a high-ranking official would definitely be a good way to start.

Judging by the sounds coming from the stairwell – someone taking stairs two or three at a time, and a hitch in their breathing that had nothing whatsoever to do with the exertion but had everything to do with trying not to cry – it won’t be long before said official finds out that her family is dead.

Illyria could leave. She could be gone long before Riley’s wife even arrived, be gone with no trace that she was ever there. She could even walk out the door wearing Riley’s face and greet her, tell her that everything is okay, and then let her walk in and see the two corpses and watch her collapse as her world comes tumbling down around her. She could do that, but grief is such an inconvenient emotion. Besides, it wouldn’t help her at all, and Illyria has never really seen the point of meaningless sadism.

In the end, Illyria does neither of those things. Instead, she stands by the door with her back against the wall, so that when Riley’s wife comes bursting in she won’t see her.

Sam doesn’t see Illyria. She doesn’t see Riley, either, at least not as far as Illyria can tell. Instead, she goes rushing straight to her daughter’s room. Illyria follows with silent footsteps, knowing that she won’t be noticed.

She watches Riley’s wife give a strangled sob, and reach out for her daughter before recoiling as though she was burnt. As though she can’t bring herself to touch her daughter, because if she does then this will all be real, then she’ll know that this isn’t just some miniaturised doll, some kind of trick.

Illyria moves next to her, and kneels down beside her. She places her hand on the woman’s back and schools her face into an expression of compassion. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Sam looks at her, and Illyria knows that in a few moments she’ll attack her, will rage and scream and wail and batter her with weak human fists. But right now it hasn’t sunk in yet, she’s still getting used to the fact that her family is dead.

“I didn’t want to do it.” Illyria said, and she sounds like she means it.

Then she reaches around the paradox, feeling for the Master’s mind, not bothering to be cautious or stealthy, and suddenly her mind is in a bear trap.

Literally, in a bear trap. Illyria’s mind goes completely blank, filled with a cartoonish image of a brain caught in a bear trap. At that moment Illyria is in no fit state to point out that she doesn’t actually _have_ a brain, or indeed any internal organs at all. She’s too busy being occupied by the glittering spikes piercing her mind.

When she comes back to herself, Sam is scrabbling frantically in a drawer, looking for a weapon, but Illyria is gone by the time she turns around.


	10. Chapter 10

The Master is sitting with his feet up on his desk and his chair reclined so far back that he’s almost flat. Music is playing quietly, a human song that Illyria doesn’t recognise, like, or pay any attention to. His arm is swinging idly at his side. “Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away, I met a species of creatures that survived by implanting themselves in people’s memories. They couldn’t die, not really. Not as long as they were remembered. There’s only one of them left, now. Just one, out of a whole species. You don’t have to imagine what that’s like – you _know_. It’ll remember me as long as it lives. Now, normally I’d tell you that you should use that pretty little brainless head of yours to try and work out how a species that can’t die as long as people remember it is both dead _and_ remembered, but I suspect that you can work that out just fine without any veiled threats. Besides, you’re _smiling_. I can feel you, standing there and grinning. So go on then. Say whatever it is you want to say.”

He’s right. She is smiling. She’s smiling as widely as she had been when she’d first heard Archangel, because she’s worked something out, and she knows what she’s going to do about it. “You’re so young.” Illyria says. “What are you, a few hundred years old? A thousand? Ten thousand? Not older than that, I think. I can’t remember being ten thousand – it was so long ago that it doesn’t even make sense to ask when it was, and besides, we didn’t do anything as gauche as measure age in years. A year flickered by too quickly to even notice. But even so, I don’t think I was ever quite as young as you.”

The Master folds his hands behind his head and tilts his chair upwards slightly, so that he can actually see her. “Unless you’re about to tell me that you’ve always preferred younger men, I’m not really seeing the point of your story.”

“You bluster. You threaten. I do not.” Illyria said simply. “I used to, when I first returned in this body. I would threaten people with such violence and vehemence, and I would carry through with those threats. I have gouged out eyes, crushed spines, severed limbs, because I said that I would. But I came to realise that I didn’t threaten to make people afraid, though that is what I told myself I was doing. I was small. I look human, and people tend to treat me as though I am. I didn’t want to be human. It was bluster, empty words from someone who could not accept a change in situation.”

She pauses, so that the Master has time to respond. She would enjoy it if he were to leap to his feet and denounce her, claim that she knows nothing, because that would prove her point before she even has to make it and both of them would know it. But he doesn’t speak – the only movement he makes is a slight narrowing of his eyes.

“But eventually I stopped threatening. People do that themselves. So often I have met demons, vampires, humans who spend so much time threatening that they miss the opportunity to carry through with them. There was no need to threaten. It came to the point where people used _me_ as a threat, told them to behave or else I’d be set on them, like I was some kind of big bad wolf at the end of a long, long leash. Threats accomplish nothing.”

The Master raises a hand, eyes sparkling with amusement. He’s schooled his expression into one matching an admonished schoolchild, and he seems intent on waiting for Illyria to call on him. She does so, with an incline of her head. “But I _didn’t_ threaten anyone. I just killed them. I just got up one morning and thought that today I’d ruin some people’s lives. I didn’t bluster, Miss. Honestly I didn’t.”

“No? Then why am I here? Since we met, you’ve killed half a dozen Slayers, you’ve shown me a paradox and a machine trapped in eternal torment, and you’ve killed every man, woman, child and animal in a building. I cannot imagine that you did that for any reason other than because I’m here.”

“Ooh, ooh! Miss, I know this one! I wanted to start a war, Miss! I wanted all the little humans to pick up their little weapons and start hacking away at each other. Didn’t have anything to do with you.”

“Then explain your toy to me.” The Master tilts his head, looking at her quizzically. “The blonde woman. Lucy. Have you told her what you are, yet? Does she feel your hearts when you hold her tight? Have you showed her the paradox machine, has she felt eternity breaking? Does she know what you’re going to do? Will you have her standing by your side when you look down at the world that lies broken at your feet? Will you take her again and again until she hears the same drums as you do? Nothing that you are doing here requires a human. Not with Archangel pulsing through the minds of the world. It’s not enough for you to just rule. You don’t need a war – that’s just something to keep you occupied until the paradox machine is ready. You need someone to show off to. That’s what she’s for. You’ll keep pushing at her, slowly, revealing yourself bit by bit so that she’ll know what you are. So that she’ll pat you on your head and say that you’re a good little monster.”

The Master propels himself upright and uses the momentum to vault easily over his desk. Incongruously, he then decides to perch daintily on the desk’s edge. “You’ve got it backwards. I don’t need some... _companion_ following me around. Lucy... she’s fun. This whole situation, the politics, all of it – it’s _hilarious_. These humans will vote for me, love me, hang off every word I say as though it was gospel - even when I don’t say anything at all. Then, when the time comes, they’ll know that they could have stopped me, if only they hadn’t loved me quite so much. They’ll hate me, of course, but they’ll hate themselves too. And that, that’s just _wonderful_. Yes, I was planning on telling Lucy who I am, eventually. I was going to take her to the end of the universe and show her the warped, twisted remnants of humanity. Make it so that she’s hollow and empty and doesn’t care about anything at all, so that she’ll dance at the end of the world. Turn her into nothing but a shell.” The Master stands, puts his hands on Illyria’s shoulders. His face is very close to hers, his eyes bore into hers. It doesn’t occur to her that he might be about to kiss her – at this distance, the sensation of fracturing time that follows wherever the Master moves is almost painful. “You’re wrong, little blue. I don’t need anyone. But people... people are _fun_. We can’t all be as business-like and dry as you. What’s the point in ruling the world, if you can’t stop to admire the flowers – and stomp them under your feet?”

“There’s no point.” Illyria says. “No reason. Sadism is irrelevant. The only things that matter is to rule, and never to die. To rise and never to fall. There’s no reason to... _crush_ people, not when it serves no goal. You killed a whole building, and there was no need to. It’s just... gratuitous violence.”

“No point? No _point_? Oh, you’re just _sad_ , you know? Sad! You don’t get it – they’re just pets, all of them, pets and punching bags. I could have just had the human and the child shot, but where’s the fun in that? His wife... she hates, now, hates so strongly that she’s wondering how she can even take it, she’s shaking, _quivering_ with rage.” The Master pokes Illyria in the chest. “She hates _you_.”

“You told me once that I was the Council’s pet. I told you that I wasn’t.” Illyria reaches up and puts her hand over the Master’s own. It could be the start of a caress or the prelude to her grinding it into dust – Illyria isn’t sure which. Though it would take no effort for her to snap the Master like a twig, and even he isn’t fast enough to stop her, the Master doesn’t seem to be afraid. Oh, his eyes widen, he sucks in a rapid breath, but his pupils also dilate. Illyria realises that he had referred to Lucy solely in the past tense, and wonders if she’s taken the other woman’s place, or if this is just the Master playing his games again. “I won’t be yours. I hear Archangel. I feel the paradox raging away. I thought that you wanted to rule, that finally there was someone who was going to act, who was going to make a play for the world and was going to win. But you aren’t interested in ruling. You think too small. You’re too interested in the little people, the humans, demons, whatever. You want to push them along like puppets, and that’s fine, but they push you along too. You said that Sam hates now, that she’s quivering with rage. She isn’t the only one quivering.” She drops his hand and steps away. Her expression is disgusted, and she is careful to send the emotion through the psychic link as well because she knows that the human is face isn’t sufficiently mobile to express the depths of her emotions. She brushes her shoulders and stands with her hands away from her sides, as though the very act of being touched by the Master was _dirty_ and she’s just waiting until she has a chance to clean up. “If you want to rule, I will be with you every step of the way. But if you want to continue playing these games... I will have no part of that.”

The Master doesn’t look angry, not at all. As he straightens his clothes and clears his throat, he looks like nothing quite so much as someone who’s been flirting with someone only to be told in no uncertain terms that she isn’t interested. “So, what, then? You think I can just let you walk out of the door?”

Illyria spreads her arms. “Kill me, then. If you can. Crush me beneath your feet. Go on. If you want to play a game, play it with me. Make your move.”

Something hits her in the back, something which burns, something is on her, something made of dozens of sharp slashes which slice through her skin as though it was barely even there. She doesn’t scream, doesn’t cry out.

She hears the Master say something, but for the first time in her existence she doesn’t catch it – there’s too much blood in her ears.


	11. Chapter Eleven

It’s later, and pain has happened.

Illyria isn’t entirely certain how much later it is. In other circumstances, she could say without a shadow of a doubt that it has been a day and a half – that’s definitely how long it _feels_ like she’s been unconscious – but she isn’t willing to trust her senses. Not when the Master is involved.

She isn’t sure where she is, either. She’s in a room without a door, windows or indeed furnishings of any kind. There’s not enough room for her to sit down, which is fine because she doesn’t need to. There are no lights, but her body temperature is enough for her to see by – although there isn’t anything to see. She’s in a tiny room made entirely out of some kind of metal, the same future metal that the Master’s sphere is made of.

There is something that she can hear, though. Something apart from Archangel and the paradox’s endless roaring in her mind.

It’s an engine. It sounds like a jet engine, only significantly louder. There’s also a thready, almost imperceptible wavering to it – in short, it sounds like the kind of engine that a human scientist might design, and send to Harry Saxon for some improvements. The walls hum with the engine’s power, which tells Illyria that she’s most likely being transported somewhere.

Truthfully, this irritates her. Not because she doesn’t know where or even _when_ she is – she’s gotten used to uncertainty. She’s irritated for two reasons. The first is simple – she doesn’t like the fact that the Master was able to knock her out at all. She doesn’t like the fact that her back still aches from thousands of cuts – she doesn’t like the fact that she was even able to be cut in the first place. If she was even a shade of what she had once been, there would be nothing that on the planet that would be even a temporary setback to her. But that was then, and this is now.

The second reason is more complicated.

Illyria is irritated that she isn’t dead.

She doesn’t _want_ to die. She has spent a good deal of her existence trying to ensure that that doesn’t happen and, no matter how much she might rail against her current weakness, she would never, ever trade it for the endless emptiness of death. Nevertheless, she is still irritated that she isn’t dead – or, rather, that the Master hadn’t killed her.

She knows that she could come up with some kind of reason to explain why he hadn’t. Maybe he couldn’t kill her at all – after all, Illyria has no heart to stop. She doesn’t breathe, so there will never be a last breath. Whatever life she has in this shell, maybe it’s enough that nothing the Master has, not even sudden burns to the back or sharp slashes, can take it from her. But she also knows that that isn’t true. The Master can break time – if he put his mind to it, he could break her.

He just doesn’t want her dead. She doubts that she’s of any use to him – she’s more of a hindrance than anything else – but he won’t kill her. If she were in his position she would have killed him without a second thought, and it irritates her that he won’t offer her the same courtesy. Of course, she doesn’t need people, while he does. Someone who chooses to be called the Master will always need to have someone else nearby, just so that he can prove that he’s better than them.

That’s why she’s there, in that room. Though she suspects that a better word would be _kennel_.

She knows that he’ll contact her soon. He’ll want to gloat, to say something that’s vainglorious, self-serving and a colossal waste of everyone’s time. This leaves Illyria with two options.

The first is to wait for the Master, but that’s unsupportable. She doesn’t wait. It isn’t in her nature. She’s a creature of action – she doesn’t want to react.

The second is simple, and requires only her fist.

She barely has the room to bring her fist upright, and certainly doesn’t have the room to bring it back, but she doesn’t need momentum. She’s strong, stronger than Slayers. She’s unperturbed when the impact of her fist on the wall seems to have no effect. She has nothing better to do than try again, and again, and again. 

Well, almost nothing.

When she tries again, she doesn’t do it while she’s wearing her usual face. It’s much older than Fred had ever been. It’s also male, and wearing a white shirt and a black waistcoat. She looks like some kind of antiquated academic – a professor, in fact, complete with thin white hair and a genial expression. It’s a face that the Master will recognise, because it was once his own.

Illyria had only seen it for a brief few seconds, inside the paradox machine, but that’s all she needs – besides, a few seconds in there might very well be the same as an eternity. It is, of course, only a superficial mimicry. It would fool a human, unless they tried to take her pulse or her temperature, but that would be all. All Illyria is really doing is changing the pattern of her shell. Everything inside is still the same. She knows that she won’t fool the Master for even a second.

But it will make him angry, and in that room, in the dark, that’s about all that Illyria can look forward to. 

~*~

It takes longer than Illyria had thought for the Master to contact her. She had expected him to be monitoring her to check when she woke up – not because he has nothing better to do, because she is _sure_ that he does, but because he just isn’t the sort of person to do them, not when he has the opportunity to play with a new toy. She suspects that he’s putting off speaking to her, telling himself that he’s leaving her to stew, and at any moment he’ll lose patience and gloat.

She realises that she’s wrong as soon as he _does_ contact her.

For one thing, it isn’t him. Oh, when an image displays on the wall in front of her, he’s certainly _there_. It’s just not him that’s speaking.

The image is one of almost sickening domesticity – it’s a room replete with bookcases and the innumerable knick-knacks that inevitably appear in a house that’s lived in. It even has a fire in the hearth. This alone is enough to tell her that it’s not somewhere owned by the Master, who’s more at home in a blue box that houses a ship larger than the city.

Of course, the lived-in atmosphere isn’t the only clue that the room isn’t the Master’s, even though he’s in it, sitting on an old armchair in the middle of the room. The most conclusive clue is the woman sitting on his lap, holding a piece of paper.

“Are you sure you want me to read this, Harry?” Lucy says uncertainly as she scans through it. “This seems kind of... personal.” She doesn’t say _weird_ , she’s much too polite for that, but Illyria can tell that it’s what she’s thinking.

The Master wraps an arm around her waist and plants a kiss on her neck. At that point, Lucy would do anything that he asked, Archangel or no. “Just read it, won’t you?” Though the tone is cajoling, the words still seem to convey some kind of threat – or at least Illyria thinks they do. If they do, Lucy doesn’t notice. Instead she just blushes happily and settles on his lap.

“Dear Illyria.” Lucy begins. “You’re probably thinking that you’re right, that this entire song and dance proves that everything that you said was true. That the only reason that you’re where you are is because I don’t just need to win, but I need to make you know it too.” Lucy frowns. “Where _is_ Illyria, Harry? You said you’d ask her if she wanted to have lunch with me or something, get to know each other, you know-“

“Just keep reading.” The Master interrupts. There’s now no hint of cajolement in his voice, and Illyria doubts that even Lucy could miss his tone.

Sure enough, Lucy clears her throat and continues. “You’re wrong, of course. I mean, I _did_ win, but that’s beside the point – that’s got nothing to do with your situation. You think that you’ve got nothing else to offer besides a hollow victory, but that’s not true. You’ve seen something, something far more valuable than you know. You’ve seen him – or should I say _them_? You thought they were just memories, and you’re so stuck in your own past that you didn’t realise memories don’t have to only work in one direction.”

Illyria watches Lucy’s face change, as she reads. She knows that she’s thinking that there’s something behind this message, something between Illyria and the Master that she didn’t know about and couldn’t even begin to grasp. Illyria doesn’t care about this at all – Lucy can think what she likes. It doesn’t matter in the slightest, not when the Master can change her mind with a handful of words and a playful touch. She doesn’t care about the Master, either. She doesn’t care about the fact that he seems to be looking intently at her, as though he can see her (maybe he can), as though she’s some complicated painting he’s trying to understand. In that moment, she has much, much more to care about.

“So that’s why you’re where you are. That’s why you have value. I’ll let you figure out why that's valuable in the first place, but you need to know that it is. But first, let me ask you this – if you think that we’re so different, if you think that I’m a vainglorious showboating maniac, then explain Giles. Explain your smile, when we first met. You love a show as much as I do – you’re just too scared to admit it.” Lucy continues, her voice getting smaller. She half-turns, as though she’s trying to catch a glimpse of the Master’s expression, but his hand moves to her shoulder and she doesn’t push it. Illyria knows that she’s wondering if she’s just a proxy, a voice that the Master’s borrowing to flirt with someone else.

Illyria doesn’t wonder about that. It doesn’t interest her, not even for a moment.

“Oh, and one last thing – she has a name for you, you know. She names everyone who travels in her. She called you the Woman-That-Was. What do you think of that?” 

Illyria closes her eyes and stops moving. She doesn’t need to see Lucy’s incomprehension, and she doesn’t want to see whatever expression the Master’s chosen to wear. She has other things to think about. There, in a room made of metal that doesn’t exist yet, a room she can’t break out of, she stands and thinks. She thinks about a moment of silence, the difference between screaming and shattering, and a moment that may have happened but is by no means guaranteed to have always have happened.

In short, she thinks about escape.


	12. Chapter Twelve

Illyria felt like she’d been hit by a tidal wave. She felt as though there was an unendurable, impossible pressure forcing her back against her seat. She felt like she had to turn her head so that the wave wouldn’t keep endlessly driving into her face, but movement was impossible, _thought_ was impossible, there was only pressure. She felt as though she couldn’t breathe, as though she was being squeezed so tightly that not only was every bit of air being forced out of her, but as though every breath that she had ever taken had suddenly never happened. It didn’t matter that she didn’t need to breathe, that she didn’t even have lungs to begin with, she still felt as though she’d been hollowed out. She felt as though everything that was her had been scooped out, and she’d been flattened atom-thin by the pressure.

She knew, of course, that she hadn’t been hit by a tidal wave. She hadn’t been hit by anything. There was no water, nothing even resembling it nearby. The pressure was real, though – or, rather, it _felt_ real. She moved her hand, and everything was fine, everything was normal. Her hand moved as it always moved – there wasn’t anything wrong with the air itself, even though it felt thick, almost solid. It wasn’t the gravity, either-

Illyria heard a voice, and she was surprised to hear that it was hers. Or, rather, it was the voice that came with her shell. She’d grown used to it, over the years, but suddenly it was as though she was hearing it with different ears – it sounded thin, insubstantial. She could barely hear it over the sound of... something, something which was roaring in her head. She sounded so frail and small and _young_.

“I feel what’s to happen, all happened before.” It was her voice, undoubtedly her voice. It had come tumbling from her lips, but it had tumbled unbidden. She hadn’t planned the words, didn’t know what it meant and would never have chosen them even if she had. It sounded like vague mysticism and that wasn’t Illyria, not at all.

She looked over at the Master to see if he felt like she did – she half-expected him to be pressed against his seat, his face rippling as _something_ forced against him. The other half expected him to be looking at her as though she’d lost her mind – or, rather, an expression of faint amusement which only hinted that he thought that.

She was right, for the most part. His expression would most definitely pass for amused – most people would say he was. But she wasn’t most people, and she knew him better than that. She saw that he looked amused, yes, but the word _confused_ quickly came to mind and, for some reason that Illyria wasn’t really sure about, _fused_ followed shortly after. She strongly suspected that he had as little idea of what was going on as she did.

“What did you do?” The Master said. “You... something happened. What...?”

“Did it?” The words came easily, almost without her intending them. They sounded insubstantial in her ears, almost like the way frost melting in the first rays of the sun looks. “I didn’t do anything.” Even as she spoke, her mind was working – she felt as though she was lying, and she couldn’t say why. Illyria was always in control of herself, complete control. She wasn’t fooled by illusions, she didn’t lie, and she _certainly_ never compared sounds to melting frost. Something was wrong. She knew that she could work it out, if only the noise and the pressure would stop, but she knew that it never, ever would.

The Master stood and pulled something out of a pocket. It was long and thin and metallic, and seemed altogether too big to fit inside his suit without ruining the lines of it. It glowed briefly with an orange light, and he looked at it as though he expected it to tell him something. Illyria had no interest in what the device could possibly show – she was far more interested in the fact that she instinctively hated it with a deep, irrational rage that made her want to snatch it from him and shatter it into thousands of pieces and throw them out of the plane. Of course, she didn’t do that – she was rather more interested in trying to work out why she felt like that in the first place. Illyria didn’t do rage, not like that. For her, anger was a cold, channelled thing. She didn’t see the point in destroying something, not without due cause.

“ _Twenty minutes to landing, Mister Saxon._ ”

Whatever the device was showing the Master, he didn’t like it. His brow furrowed and his eyes narrowed. “No, that doesn’t make sense, the paradox shouldn’t be doing that.” He looked at Illyria, and she _knew_ beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was going to accuse her of something – maybe he’d even be right – but she wasn’t interested in what he had to say. She was far more interested in what he’d already said.

“Paradox.” Illyria said, her mouth curving into a smile like an excited schoolgirl – which was more or less exactly what she felt like. She felt young and free, because she remembered the last time she’d felt a paradox ago all those aeons ago, before the Cataclysm. She’d been so very young then. She laughed at the Master’s expression. “When it breaks down, it all breaks down until there’s nothing unbroken. It starts... then and now and it ends before it’s begun.”

The Master smiled, seemingly despite himself. “Well, yeah. That’s kind of the point.”

It was a sentiment that Illyria could get behind. So many things would be better if they’d ended before they begun – what did it matter if you broke time to get that done? If it meant that you could rise eternal, never to fall, glorious for all eternity...

She heard something, dimly, in the back of her mind. She squashed it. It was swallowed by the roaring in her head. It never happened at all.


	13. Chapter Thirteen

Déjà vu had never been a concept that Illyria understood. She was well aware that humans experienced it - she even remembered it, thanks to Fred’s lingering memories. She knew what it was, she just didn’t understand how they could possibly feel it. Feeling as though you were living through something that you’d already lived through was incomprehensible to her. She knew _exactly_ what it felt like to live more than life at once. She knew what it was like to rewind time and then relive a moment that you had already experienced. But déjà vu wasn’t like that. 

Déjà vu was someone _as they were in that moment_ feeling as though they had lived that before, and _that_ was the part that baffled Illyria. At no point was Illyria the same as she had been before, nor was the same as she was going to be. As bitter as she might be about the fact that she was no longer the being of immense power that she had once been, she knew that she wasn’t that Illyria, hadn’t been for such a long time that it didn’t even make sense to try and work out how long it had been. She knew she wasn’t the same person that she had been even a few hours ago, when the Master had appeared in her doorway with eternity glittering in his eyes and time splintering around him. The idea that she, _as she was in that moment_ , had already lived that moment was absurd.

But she felt as though she had, and that was how Illyria knew that something was very, very wrong.

For his part, the Master didn’t seem to have noticed. He was prattling on about his paradox machine, as though Illyria was even capable of caring about that. They both knew that she would never understand the technical details, that she knew nothing about reality matrices or time rotors, but that didn’t stop him from telling her about them. For a moment, she thought that he might be telling her simply to reassure himself that the machine was still doing exactly what it was supposed to do, after that incident a few minutes ago. She quickly dismissed the idea, though - the Master was far too self-assured to babble.

The Master spoke, and Illyria listened attentively. She didn’t understand the vast majority of what he was saying - the technical details went far over her head - but she knew that if she, _she_ , was feeling déjà vu, then a paradox machine was as good of a cause as any. 

The plane landed, and the Master flashes her a smile as though nothing had happened, as though everything was right with the world and she couldn’t hear time breaking in her head. “Do you want to see it?”

“See what?”

“The paradox machine, of course.”

Illyria mulled it over. The Master frowned slightly, even before she gave her answer, and the frown only deepened when she finally did. “No.”

“What do you mean, ‘no’?”

“No.”

The Master stepped in close, close enough that she would definitely feel uncomfortable if she were human. “That’s not how this goes. You come with me, you see the machine. That’s how this goes. That’s how this was _always_ going to go. You know that, I know that - stop being contrary.”

Illyria looked at him coolly. She suspected that she was being threatened, but she wasn’t entirely sure what for. She didn’t know what he was talking about. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He tilted his head and didn’t even bother to hide his surprise, or the crushing disdain that quickly followed it. “You mean you _don’t_ feel it? I thought you, of all people - you don’t feel it? It’s a fixed point. Time is thick, here and now. Thick enough to crush us and squeeze us into the future. You come with me. You see the machine. That’s how this goes.”

Illyria put her face close to his, close enough that there’s virtually no distance between the two, and when she speaks she, too, doesn’t bother to hide her crushing disdain. “What makes you think that I’d listen, when time speaks? What makes you think that I’d ever pay attention? Time tells me that I should be dead, should have been dead for aeons. Time tells me I should be in a tiny box in a tiny hole in a tiny planet. Time tells me that I should be a museum piece, dusty and forgotten. But I’m still here. I stole a body. I carved out its soul and sat in its heart. Time means nothing to me. When this world is gone and this star has died, I’ll still be alive. Time can say whatever it likes, but I’m. Not. Listening.”

She could feel the Master’s hearts beating, a steady four-beat rhythm. They didn’t speed up when she spoke. He didn’t react at all, not for several seconds. “Say that again.”

She stepped away in disgust. She had no time for his games, not now. She felt as though she was finally pulling ahead, somehow, and she knew that if this continued the Master would find some way to turn this all around on her. 

Because of that, she almost missed seeing him pull out his long metallic device. She almost missed the pulse of orange light. But she didn’t miss it. She didn’t miss the expression he made when he looked at it, either. She didn’t miss it, but that didn’t mean that she knew what it meant, either.

“Fine.” The Master said, after a moment. “There’s something else that you should see.”

~*~

The building that the Master took her to was a large warehouse, surrounded by other, similarly large warehouses. If Illyria had been the kind of person who expected things, she wouldn’t have expected the Master to have anything to do with a building like this. He seemed like the kind of person to do things right under everyone’s noses, in the sure and certain knowledge that Archangel would stop anyone from looking too closely. This looked more like the kind of place that the Slayers would raid, because it was a nest of vampires. For a moment she even thought that that might be what they were there for, that maybe they were going to attack the Slayers while they were attacking some vampires.

But then The Master put a code into a keypad next to the door (1-2-3-4), and the door slid open, and Illyria realised that that wasn’t it, not at all.

For one thing, the building was bigger on the inside. She saw people on bicycles, cycling to get from one side to the other. She saw elevators going to more floors than you would ordinarily see in a skyscraper, let alone a warehouse. She saw scientists, and people with guns who looked the same as the people who had accompanied the Master in Cleveland. She saw alien artefacts everywhere.

“This way.” The Master gestured to an elevator. Illyria hesitated for the briefest of moments - this could be a trap - but then she followed him. She had nothing better to do, and besides, she felt no déjà vu here.

The elevator went down, down far enough that Illyria wondered how they’d managed to walk into a different dimension without her noticing. Finally, the elevator came to a stop.

This room was much smaller than the others, and much less busy. In fact, there wasn’t anyone there except for them. The lighting was low, which Illyria was certain was for dramatic effect, right up to the point that the Master pressed a switch on the wall and the lights came up and she saw what was in the room.

In that moment, Illyria was glad that she had no stomach, because if she had she was sure that everything that had ever been in it would now be strewn across the floor.

The object, such as it was, was unremarkable. It was black, and spherical. It floated without any apparent means of support.

And everything about it was wrong. 

Not wrong in the same way as the paradox was wrong. That was just the future rising up, cresting in an endless wave that would all too soon come crashing down and wash away the past. That was just something breaking - admittedly, something that shouldn’t break, but still, just something breaking.

But this wasn’t a thing at all. It was an absence of thing. She could see it, technically, but she was sure that she just saw the rest of the room because the lights were on and her inferior senses just told her that she was also seeing the sphere in the middle of the room. There was nothing there - not a hole in reality, not a tear in the universe. Just… nothing. Truly, genuinely empty space.

“Once upon a times, there was a war. One side made that.” The Master said. His tone was odd. If Illyria were more collected, she might almost have thought that there was a note of reverence to it. “The ultimate escape pod. A lot of things were made, during that war, made by both sides. The side that made that also made something else. Some kind of sentient… _thing_ , that lived in a ripple in reality. A ship killer. Lured in our ships and pulled out their minds so it could eat them.”

Illyria, with, some difficulty, tore her gaze away from the sphere and faced the Master. “Why are you telling me this?”

“The paradox machine was a ship, once. It used to move, until I forced it to stand still and then I twisted the universe around it until it broke. But before that, a long, _long_ time before that, the ship sat in a museum.” The Master looked at Illyria. “I used to be able to hear it scream, as the paradox built inside it. Now I can’t. There’s just you. A sentient thing that pulled the mind out of my machine.”


	14. Chapter Fourteen

Illyria stared at the sphere. She knew that the Master was looking at her - she suspected that he wasn't waiting for a reaction so much as he was anticipating her counter-move - but she wasn't going to indulge him, at least not yet. So she stared at the sphere. It hurt, of course it hurt. It felt like the emptiness of the universe was gnawing away at her mind, but she still stared.

Eventually, she let her lips curl into something which might, in some circumstances, be taken for a smile. In others, perhaps a sneer. "You think I'm an escape pod?"

"Don't you?" The Master replied mildly.

"You think that, just because I'm empty, that something has to rush to fill me? Because I hollowed out this body and burned it's soul? I _am_ empty. There might be rage and pride but that doesn't even reach the sides, it just tumbles into the endless void. All I am is me, an endless drive. All I am is rising rising rising rising, never to fall. Empty, but for the force of my gale."

"They do say that nature abhors a vacuum." The Master murmured. "And yes, I know you're going to say that you aren't a natural thing. You're older than nature, you were there when nature came into existence, blah blah blah _blah_. You're empty but for the force of your hot wind. The fact is, you aren't just you. You didn't even notice, did you? Did you even hear what you just said? Rising, you said. Four times. I remember your face when I asked you if you heard the drums, and you said you only heard Archangel. That's not all that you hear now, is it? One-two-three-four, the call to war. To raze civilisations and raise your own."

"Do you remember?" Illyria asks simply. "I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't. I didn't at first, and you, you who calls yourself Time Lord, you were just as confused as I. We've done this dance before, you and I. You cut people down and I wondered why. You don't need to build an empire off the backs of corpses. It's a waste, pure and simple. You speak the old tongue - you are the only other who does - but even so, I don't think we speak the same language." Then, and only then, did Illyria turn to face him. "Do you remember? You put me in a kennel and I escaped. You talked about fixed points in time, about things that _must_ happen, but there is no trick to time that I don't know. So many things would be better if they'd ended before they'd begun - what does it matter if you break time to get it done?"

The Master looked at her intently, with time dying in his eyes, and she knew that he remembered. She wondered if maybe now he would do the courtesy of having her killed, or if he'll just try to lock her away again. It was unthinkable that she be the one to kill him. Not because she didn't think that she could succeed, although that was certainly a part of it. It wasn't because of the paradox, either, although that was also a part of it. She knew that he is the paradox's Master and without him the damage could be catastrophic. 

It didn't occur to her that part of the reason she doesn't think about killing him is because he is like her, something which doesn't die, something which never, ever dies. Something which clings to life in any way possible and is old beyond telling.

But that didn't occur to her.

"Let us assume the inconceivable, for a moment." The Master suggested. "Let's assume I'm wrong. Let's say that the change in your speech pattern is... a temporal echo, left over from your escape. That it will fade in time. That the thing that's as cold as space changed in a moment to a young girl grinning at a paradox as though it was the most beautiful thing that she'd ever heard. Let's assume that you are you, and that's _all_ you are. What happens next?"

Illyria had never been someone given to uncertainty, but in that moment she felt that she couldn't communicate any more eloquently than with a shrug. "You kill me, I kill you. You lock me away, I stuff you into that sphere." She smiled faintly. "That’s how this goes. That’s how this was _always_ going to go. You know that, I know that - stop being-”

"There is another option." The Master interrupted smoothly.

"We both know that you were never going to let me rule with you." Illyria pointed out. "That was just a pretty lie to get me to come with you. We aren't the type to share power. Master."

He smiled briefly at the sound of his name on her lips. "I wasn't talking about that. You haven't noticed it yet, have you? Your escape was... messy. Listen." The smile appeared again, but this time it was one that Illyria had seen before. He was playing a game, one which he thought he was winning.

But Illyria had nothing else to do but to listen, and when she did she realised instantly what the Master is talking about. "How long is left? A week?"

"Three days. Three days until the skies open and the world ends. Three days until the paradox is ready and the future sweeps away the past. There were months, when we first met." The Master grinned. "How time flies when you're having fun, hmm?"

Illyria didn't say anything. She was reasonably sure that the Master had paused so that she could congratulate him, and that wasn't going to happen. She'd already known that he was going to win this battle, and that this battle would end the war that the Slayers had been fighting for millennia. She didn't feel the need to congratulate him on something that had always been a certainty.

"So. I'll say this. You stay with me until the sky opens. No games, no power plays. A truce. There's someone I'd like you to meet." The smile isn't for her, she's sure. "Formally, that is. You saw their ghosts last... time you were in London. I told you before, he's why you're valuable, why you're still alive, and I'm sticking with that. Afterwards... that's up to you. This planet is just the beginning. I could do with a general. Sure, we'll probably kill each other eventually, but at least we can build an empire that would put the stars to shame. What do you say?"


	15. Chapter Fifteen

Sometimes, Illyria wonders if the Master has any defences at all. Maybe he just acts like he does, and because she knows that she would be fortified to the hilt if she were him she doesn’t dare attack – and so he doesn’t bother to defend.

More usually, Illyria thinks that he’s so heavily defended that he acts as though he’s taking risks, whereas actually he’s doing anything but.

Either explanation are the only ones she can think of for the current situation. For one thing, she’s been given a gun. She’s also dressed as though she was another one of the suited security humans that he has littered all over the Valiant, which would make it easy enough for her to get away and sabotage something vital. While it’s been months since she was last trapped here, more than long enough for the Master to fix the faint, thready sound of it’s engine that she had heard in the room she’d been trapped in, she has no doubt that she can make it plummet out of the sky if she so chose. She’d survive. She doesn’t think anyone else would.

She doesn’t know if there’s any reason she can’t shoot him, right here and now. She doesn’t know if there’s any reason she can’t vandalise the flying ship they’re both on. Paradoxically, that very lack of reason is the very reason she can’t. She doesn’t take risks.

The paradox is so loud, now.

And then, between one moment and the next, she can feel them. Even through the paradox. 

Illyria can feel the Doctor, which surprises her. She can’t feel the Master, not like this. Oh, when she looks at him she can see time withering away and dying, and when he stands too close it feels like she’s thin ice which is already broken but just hasn’t realised yet. But then he leaves the room, and if it wasn’t for his double heartbeat it would almost be as though he was human.

She had thought the Doctor would be the same. Everything the Master has said seems to suggest that they’re the same species as he is, and yet she can feel them from here. It’s not like the paradox. The paradox is the sound of something breaking. They feel like a counterpoint to it – something which doesn’t break, which doesn’t ever break. She hasn’t felt anything like it before, which isn’t a situation she's ever encountered, not in this shell. When she searches for the words to cover what it feels like, all she can think of is what the Master had said before – a fixed point. The paradox can’t touch this, she thinks. It’s an immovable force meeting an irresistible object.

Of course, the Doctor has tried to hide their arrival – they feel off-centre, as though they’re trying to make Illyria look at the space around them and therefore make themselves invisible. It doesn’t work. She feels the paradox, even though the Master hid it, and she feels the Doctor now.

The paradox is so loud, now.

She can’t tell if the Master can. He’s having fun at the expense of the American president, who’s so terribly nervous that his heart is almost ready to tear itself apart like a sheet of wet paper. He’s hiding it behind a façade of gruff irritability, and the Master obviously isn’t buying it.

It’s only a matter of minutes before they go live, and all of this is broadcast to the whole world. The first meeting with an alien race. Well, the first _official_ , government-sanctioned one. The Toclafane, they’re called. Illyria doesn’t know the Master’s language, but she wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out that meant ‘paradox race’, or something of the like. It won’t be long before the world meets them, she knows. Metal spheres, no longer content to be paperweights humming with unseen machinery. They have voices, now. She’s heard them laugh. She’s heard what they laugh at, and she’s sure that the rest of the planet won’t find it funny.

She wonders if anyone involved with the Slayers will notice her in the background of the broadcast. She doubts it – most of them have never seen her, and besides, she’s less blue than usual at the moment. In any case, Archangel has been enough to stop them from being up here, so it seems logical that it would stop them from seeing her, too. Not that it would make any difference, she knows. The Toclafane will find them just as fun as they find the rest of humanity.

The Doctor’s almost here, now. They’ve raced non-stop from the bowels of the ship, galloping in to save the day. She wonders what face they're wearing, and if she’ll recognise it. She knows it’ll be young – the temporal echo of the Master she’d seen in the paradox machine had been enough to tell her that – but there are plenty of faces that fit the bill.

She thinks briefly about telling the Master, but he’s busy eating jelly babies with Lucy and besides, it isn’t as though they’re allies. She’s seen the Doctor before, wearing more than a dozen faces, and nothing that she’s seen indicates that he’d approve of the Master’s plan. She wants to see what they’re like in the flesh, how they’ll try and stop the Master. Maybe, just maybe, they’ll reveal some weakness of the Master’s, something that she can exploit.

Then they come in, and they aren’t all what Illyria had expected.

Illyria had thought that there would be just one person, but there isn’t. She thought it would just be the Doctor, because even though there had been so many others in the paradox machine’s memories, they were the one constant. The faces changed, the _personalities_ changed, but the Doctor was forever. Nothing that the Master had said had given any indication that there would be anyone else.

She should have realised that there wouldn’t have been. To the Master, anyone else would have been of such little interest that it wouldn’t have even been worth mentioning.

As it turned out, there are three of them. One is human, and Illyria instantly disregards her as no consequence. She follows behind the other two, as though she were just along for the ride and had been too swept up by everything when it all turned serious. 

The second is something which Illyria supposed might be called a man. It looks human. Its temperature, heartbeat, _everything_ seems to suggest that it is. It looks _like_ a human – tall, handsome, male – but that isn’t at all what it is. This is what she’d felt, appearing in the depths of the Valiant. The fixed point. The thing which doesn’t change. It grates across her senses like sandpaper. It’s loud, almost impossibly so. It would be loud even if the thing wasn’t wearing some kind of machine around its wrist, some kind of time travel technology which is harsh and crude and echoes like a whirlwind in a small room. It’s so loud that it almost overshadows the third one. It almost overshadows the paradox.

The paradox is so loud, now.

But the third one is the Doctor. She’s seen him – and they are male, this time – once before, briefly. Out of all the faces that she’d seen, this is the one that she’d seen the least. He’s tall and skinny and his eyes are trained on the Master. The Master, for his part, has stiffened almost imperceptibly, although he hasn’t looked around or given any other indication that he’s noticed them come in.

No one else seems to have noticed them, either. Something about them makes everyone’s attention slide off them as though they weren’t there. Illyria is the only one who’s looking at them directly.

The Doctor feels as she would have expected him to. While time coruscates around the Master like a billion billion fireworks going off at once, the Doctor feels almost restrained. Time flows around him like a river, channelled and directed and calm – until he sweeps you up in the current. For a moment, Illyria wonders what it would be like if she’d met this one first. She wonders if he hears the drumming, like the Master does.

The other one, the fixed point, seems to have seen her looking at them. He opens his mouth to say something to the Doctor, so Illyria forces her eyes to wander, as though she were a simple human who was fooled by their disguise. She moves away from them, to put them at ease. They don’t need to know that she can be anywhere in the room in a heartsbeat, if she wanted to be. So she stands, watching, gun at her hip.

The cameras are working now, and the President is speaking. The Toclafane appear, floating around him, and Illyria pays no attention to them. They’re just children, and the adults are talking.

“This plan, you going to tell us?” The fixed point says. It sounds American, although she suspects it might be more accurate to say that America sounds like it.

The Doctor holds up something, a dangling necklace.. It takes Illyria a moment to focus on what it is, before she realises that it’s a key. The irony of hiding with a key is not lost on her. “If I can get this around the Master's neck, cancel out his perception, they'll see him for real. It's just hard to go unnoticed with everyone on red alert. If they stop me, you've got a key.”

 _That’s_ their plan? Illyria has to say, she doesn’t think much of it. It isn’t just that the Doctor has to take off his key for the plan to work, which would mean that a stranger will suddenly be revealed in a room full of nervous people with guns, not to mention four entities from the future, the Master, and her. She doesn’t think that he’s fast enough to carry it off. It’s also the fact that he’s trying to beat the Master at his own game. He’s trying to mess with people’s heads, trying to beat someone who’s had fifteen satellites beaming his four-beat rhythm into everyone’s minds for more than a year, now. She doesn’t think that the Master will be beaten that way.

The Master stands, responding to something the Toclafane had said which Illyria hadn’t thought was worthy of her attention. A moment later the President is disintegrated, and Illyria can feel the sudden wave of radiation from where she stands. The other guards draw their guns and point them at everyone who isn’t a guard. Illyria doesn’t move at all. 

The Doctor rushes forward, pulling the key-necklace over his head, and two guards grab him. They don’t shoot, even though that would be actually have been easier given that the guns were already in their hands. It’s like the idea doesn’t even occur to them.

The fixed point follows suit, and Illyria wonders how anything can be so stupid. It’s just seen the Doctor fail before he’s even begun, and yet it’s trying the exact same thing. It doesn’t even manage to remove its key before the Master has pulled out his long metallic device and shot some kind of orange ray at it. It’s dead before it hits the ground, although Illyria knows that won’t last long. The human doesn’t move, although she clearly wants to. She just stays in the background – while the Master obviously knows she’s there, the guards don’t seem to have noticed her. Not yet.

The camera humans are still recording, all of this is still going live. The entire world has seen the President die, and the Doctor beaten before he’s even begun. She wonders how many people recognise the end of the world for what it is.

The Master is gloating at the Doctor, saying something vainglorious, self-serving and a colossal waste of everyone’s time. 

Illyria has no interest in any of this. Even if this was the most interesting thing in the universe, she doubts that she would choose to pay attention. The paradox is almost ready, so close that she can taste it in the air. It like music – more than music. It’s exactly like her own heart singing, like the song of blood pulsing through her veins. Or it would be, if she had a heart and a working blood flow. She moves to a window and looks up. She doesn’t notice the Toclafane join her, orbiting her like planets around a sun.

The paradox is so loud, now. She can’t hear anything else. It’s all there is, beating inside her.

At two minutes past eight in the morning, the sky opens in a red ragged tear, the future crashes into the past, and the world ends. Illyria feels like a drum skin which has been stretched too tight, and she is breaking, and she’s never been happier.


	16. Chapter Sixteen

The first thing that Illyria realises is that she’s shaking. She realises this even before she realises who it is that’s shaking, before she’s even aware that she is the she who realises she’s shaking. She’s quivering like a leaf, and she refuses. There will be no sign of weakness, none at all. She is ice, inscrutable and cold. 

Fortunately, no one seems to have noticed her – although she isn’t entirely sure how that’s possible, given that she’s been standing here for some time now. There’s no one on the Valiant’s bridge. Not the Toclafane, the Master, not even any security humans. She’s alone.

The paradox is gentle, now. A series of tiny waves lapping against the planet. The sky is closed, again, and now there _is_ only now, because the incipient future has already invaded it and conquered it. Even so, when she moves, Illyria is somewhat surprised that she doesn’t see ripples of time around herself. It feels like it should be a physical thing, somewhere between water and air.

Archangel, of course, now has a weight behind it like a hammer, smashing directly into her mind. It isn’t just background noise, now. It used to say _listen-trust-worship-obey_ but now it’s different. Now it’s a command, an imperative, _dread-cower-worship-obey_. The Master doesn’t need to hide anymore. He needs to rule, and nothing is more effective in the hands of a ruler like him than absolute, overwhelming fear.

But that’s no concern of hers.

~*~

She can feel the thing, shut away in the depths of the ship. She sees a handful of people as she walks there – almost all of them are security humans, dressed in the same way as she is. They don’t spare her a second glance – of course they don’t. She does see two others, however, who interest her. They’re human, both of them, middle-aged. They each have one of their legs tied to the other. They appear to be running some kind of bizarre three-legged race. It seems exactly like the kind of thing that the Master would have someone do. It’s completely pointless, humiliating, and, most interestingly, completely unsupervised. They stare at her with undisguised loathing as they struggle past.

There are two security humans outside the fixed point’s room. One of them nods at her companionably. Illyria doesn’t acknowledge her at all. Instead, she just moves to the door and discovers that it’s unlocked. She supposes that that makes sense – the thing can’t die, not permanently, but it can feel pain. It still has a human nervous system and, she suspects, a human mind. Leave the door unlocked and it will escape ten, a hundred, a thousand times. But eventually, thanks to the pain and the unremitting sting of relentless failure, it won’t try to leave even if the door's left wide open and there are no guards in sight.

The thing is lying on the floor with its eyes closed and its hands folded behind its head. There’s nowhere for it to sit – this clearly isn’t designed to be a room for habitation. It doesn’t look up when Illyria comes in. It looks somewhat the worse for wear – more accurately, its clothes do. There’s nothing that can make the fixed point be anything other than what it is, at least not for long.

Illyria sits opposite from him, her back against the wall. It doesn’t respond. If she were human, she might suppose that it was unconscious, or even sleeping. That doesn’t matter. She doesn’t need a response. She just wanted to see what it was like up close, without the key disguising it. It still feels incredibly abrasive, and every sense she has screams that he is _wrong_ , an abomination of the highest order.

Eventually, the thing speaks. It takes Illyria a moment to focus on what its saying. The words, unshielded and undisguised, make the paradox shimmer and ripple, tens of billions of millions of hundreds of temporal standing waves flickering in and out of existence. The Doctor had been stupid, Illyria reflects. If she had been him, if she had known that a paradox was coming, she wouldn’t have bothered with the Master at all. With the mind of a Time Lord, this fixed point would be more than enough to fix the paradox, to flush the Toclafane away back to their present.

“If you think it’s fun watching me sleep, you’re more than welcome to join in.”

The idea of copulating with this thing is repellent. “How do you stand it?”

“Stand it?” The fixed point says conversationally. “We could do it standing if-“

“No. Not that. How do you survive being yourself, living in your skin? How do you survive? The endless noise... why aren’t you insane? Can’t you hear it? It doesn’t stop, it doesn’t ever stop... just the endless roaring. Endless, never-ending cascading time, for all of the times to come. Nothing but you, forever, endless.”

The thing looks up, at that, and looks at her curiously. “I saw you. On the bridge. You saw us.”

“Of course.”

“What are you?” The abomination says, and Illyria knows what its thinking. It’s wondering if she’s another Time Lord, someone like the Master who won’t be fooled by their disguise and knows what it is instantly.

Illyria isn’t interested in responding. She has her own question. “How long? How long have you been like that? You can’t have been born that way. Nothing natural is like you.” She is aware, even as speaks, that the question may not make any sense. They are talking about the vagaries of time, here, and asking when something happened is always a difficult question.

But not, it seems, in this case. The thing shrugs. “A few hundred years, for me.”

“A few hundred years.” Illyria says, almost inaudibly. She stands and pulls out her gun in one smooth motion, shooting it in the head before it even has time to blink. It makes no difference to the way it feels – nothing can – but it makes her feel better. Even though a few drops of blood land on her and makes her skin crawl. She stands over it, almost as though she were waiting for it to return to life with a gasp, but instead she speaks with a voice that is barely even a whisper. “I wish it had been you.”

She turns and leaves without a backward glance. The security humans watch her go – not out of curiosity or interest, but because they’re watching the corridor and she just happens to be walking down it.

~*~

The Doctor is more difficult to find. 

He doesn’t have to be, Illyria knows. If she listens, she could hear his double heartbeat, even over the engine and the humans and the fixed point. She is fairly sure she could tell the difference between his and the Master’s - only one of them would be excited. But Illyria is in no hurry. In truth, she is surprised that the Master hasn’t already appeared and dragged her in front of the Doctor so he can gloat some more. She takes what time she has to enjoy the paradox.

So, Illyria moves through the corridors of the flying ship. She is slow, for her, and she is unbothered by the security humans, although it must be said that they are few and far between. When you have an army of metal spheres from the future, humans suddenly stop being quite so necessary. If Illyria cared, she might have wondered if the Toclafane had killed some of them, or if the Master had simply sent them down to the surface. But she doesn’t.

Illyria walks. Eventually, she starts humming, and then stops almost instantly. It’s some human ditty – of course it is, she couldn’t even hear any music of the Old Ones, let alone replicate it. She doesn’t recognise the song. She hums a few more bars, and wonders where she’d heard it before. Ordinarily, she would have expected it to be some remnant of Fred’s memories, but it isn’t. She remembers everything Fred ever knew, even things that the woman had forgotten herself. It _is_ catchy, she supposes.

Illyria walks, humming. It is a pleasant tune. Before thinking about it, Illyria makes a quick flurry of steps and then slides down the corridor, in time to her humming. It is enjoyable, so she does it again – step-step-step-step-sliiiide. She is aware, while she does it, that this isn’t at all like her. But then, she’s never ridden this shell through a paradox before, or met a fixed point. Maybe this is exactly what she’s like.

It’s not, of course. The Master was right. She shouldn’t be surprised. He’s better at mind games than she is.

A Toclafane materialises by her side, and before it is even fully solid she is perfectly upright and silent, waiting as patiently as a glacier in an expensive suit.

“You hear it, don’t you?” The Toclafane says. This one is female, or at the very least sounds like it is. “You hear the machine singing.”

Illyria nods once, sharply, as though there could be no doubt that she does. And of course she does. The paradox is the most beautiful thing she’s ever heard, at least with these ears.

“Will you tell us what it sounds like?” The sphere says, almost wistfully. Illyria is surprised. She knows the Master well enough to know what he’d want in an army, and what she’s seen of the Toclafane supports her preconceptions. This, however, doesn’t. The Toclafane moves briefly, darting ahead and back again in a motion that Illyria supposes is the equivalent of shaking ones head to clear it. “Later. The Mister Master has someone he wants you to meet. Follow.”

If Illyria had lungs, she’d sigh. “Of course he does.”


	17. Chapter Seventeen

Illyria knows they’ve arrived at the Doctor’s room the moment she sees the door. She doesn’t need to listen for a double heartbeat – the door is enough.

It’s made of wood. While the rest of the Valiant seems designed to be as futuristic as possible, or at least what a human imagines the future will look like, the door is remarkably out of place. The wood is exceptionally old, old enough that it’s probably closer to stone than wood at this point. Unlike the fixed point’s door, it’s locked, and the guards seem rather more alert. Illyria gets the feeling that, if she weren’t being accompanied by a Toclafane, she would probably be stopped.

The Master, however, is nowhere to be seen. She hears only one set of hearts beating inside. She is certain that he’s watching, but she is surprised he isn’t here. He isn’t the kind of person to miss the opportunity to gloat.

The Toclafane doesn’t escort her inside, either – after the door is unlocked, it floats aimlessly down the hallway. Whatever’s going to happen will happen unsupervised, it seems.

The room is furnished, though small. There is a book case, a bed, and a man lying on it. The man is recognisably the same as the one who she’d seen on the bridge, but he looks much, much older. Not enough to do justice to the age spangling off of him in waves, but enough that he looks older than the Master ever had. He’s halfway through a copy of ‘The Mystery of Edwin Drood’, but he puts it aside when she enters the room. He begins a moving in a way which was probably intended to spring him upright, but he winces halfway through and completes the motion in a much more sedate fashion. He hasn’t had time to get used to his new, old body. “Hello! I’m the Doctor.” He extends a hand.

Illyria doesn’t take it. She closes the door behind her and leans against it. If she were someone else, she would look at the Doctor as though he were a brand new toy, but she isn’t. She is ice, inscrutable and cold.

After a moment, the Doctor lowers his hand. He seems somewhat disappointed. “You know, a little conversation doesn’t hurt.”

Illyria shrugs. “There are better things to listen to.”

“Like what, exactly?” The Doctor says companionably. Illyria knows exactly what he’s up to – if they can talk, then maybe she’ll realise that he’s a person who doesn’t deserve to be locked away and _certainly_ doesn’t deserve whatever the Master is going to do to him. If he can talk, he can make an ally. She doesn’t point out that he isn’t the first person to try this with her. It hadn’t worked for them.

Illyria doesn’t reply. At least, she doesn’t reply with words. Instead, she merely taps against her leg, one-two-three-four. All expression drops from the Doctor in an instant. “Ah. Not just a guard, then.”

“No.”

“Not human either, I take it?”

“No.”

“Well then. Any chance you-“

“Do you want to get out of here?”

The Doctor seems to think it over. She’s sure he thinks it’s a trap, for obvious reasons – she’s not human, she seems to be working with the Master, and she’s tapping a four-beat rhythm against her leg. “And go where, exactly?”

“We could go and see the fixed point, if you like. See what you think about something that stands so still that the universe has twisted around it.”

Illyria isn’t entirely sure what the Doctor thinks about the offer. Certainly he doesn’t seem wildly enthused about seeing the fixed point. That she understands. A thing like that would be unpleasant even if it was shut away in the heart of a star – dropping by to say hello is almost unthinkable. It’s the rest of the statement that he doesn’t seem sure about. After a few moments, though, his face breaks into a smile that she is almost sure is genuine. “I’ll tell you what. I’ll go anywhere you want, if you answer a few questions as we go.”

Illyria digests the offer. She has very little information – or, at least, very information that the Doctor cannot learn if he had the senses to pay attention. Even so, the deal automatically puts her in a position of power, and there’s no way that she won’t accept that, not when it’s offered to her on a platter. “Deal.” She turns, opens the door, and sticks her head outside. “We’re going for an outing.”

The guards seem confused by this, but make no attempt to stop her. She wonders if the Master has given them instructions, or if Archangel has pummelled their minds so thoroughly that they can’t even think for themselves.

The Doctor tries to match her pace, but his bones are old now. She can hear them creaking, his joints grating. She slows down without looking at him. “So. You’re temporally aware, I assume?”

“Yes.”

“But not a Time Lord.”

“No.” Technically that wasn’t a question – he _knows_ that she isn’t like him or the Master, she can tell that much – so she doesn’t have to answer, but she does anyway. 

“Can you give me a hint? Normally I’m a fan of questions – I used to have a jumper covered in question marks. But I don’t think now is the time to play twenty questions.”

Illyria thinks before she answers. She could just tell him ‘No’. She has the power here – if she doesn’t want to give him a hint, she doesn’t have to. But, on the other hand, he has no idea who she is. She doesn’t like that, just like she hadn’t liked it when the Master had appeared and asked her who she was. So she answers, eventually, although she suspects that he won’t be able to make anything out of the answer. “He told me once that you had an empire of ten million years, and that you’re all gone now. It doesn’t make sense to wonder how long my empire lasted. When time obeyed my every whim, it was irrelevant. But I ruled for a long time, when the universe was young. Now there is no one alive who remembers it. No one but me.”

“Hmm. I’m sorry.”

She looks at him. He appears to mean it, and she wonders why. “Those who cannot save themselves don’t deserve to live. If you aren’t willing to break apart the whole of creation to save your own life, what is the point of having one?”

“There’s more to life than simply existing, you know.”

“You’re as young as he is.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean, why?”

“I think I’m a bit past youthful exuberance at this point.” The Doctor says wryly, his face folding into dozens of wrinkles. “I’ve been travelling for a long time, now. Seen more of the universe than just about anyone and, see, the thing is... Time Lords live a long time, you see, some say too.... anyway. If all I had to look forward to was a life of existence, then I might as well shut myself away somewhere and wait for the end of the universe.”

“He thinks like that, too. Oh, not quite the same way, it’s true. You explore because you cannot bear to stand still, because boredom will be the end of you. He, on the other hand, gathers people round himself like a spider spinning a web, and he sucks them dry and grins over their desiccated husks. Both of you need the universe, need something that you can react to. Life is a game, for both of you – you just play it differently.” Illyria pauses for a moment. “You’re too young to realise that it isn’t.”

Whatever the Doctor makes of this, he keeps to himself. “Where are we going?”

Illyria just smiles. They’re almost there.

“Jack’s that way.” The Doctor points down a corridor. “So we aren’t going to visit him. Except you said we were, that we were going to visit the fixed point. So, where are we going?”

Illyria doesn’t answer for about a minute. When she does so, she merely nods at a door. “After you.”

She doesn’t look at the paradox machine, when the Doctor opens the door. She doesn’t need to. She’d seen it before, in a time that had never actually happened. Besides, with the paradox ringing through the air like the peals of a bell, she doesn’t need to see the thing that’s holding it all together. She hadn’t lied. The ship is a fixed point, an anchor for a universe left adrift. She doesn’t look at the paradox machine. She only looks at the Doctor.

Illyria isn’t the kind of person who expects things. She’d never really seen the point. She especially doesn’t see the point now, with the air echoing the symphony of a paradox. Now, she can’t really say for sure whether cause will follow effect – she can’t even say for sure whether now really _is_ now, or if it’s some kind of hypothetical time, a simulation run by a man who has eternity glittering in his eyes.

She isn’t the kind of person who expects things, but if she had been, she wouldn’t expect the Doctor to react the way he does. She’s seen a lot of versions of him, seen him wearing different faces and different personalities, but all of them care for this ship. Others come and go, but the ship and the Doctor are forever. To see his ship twisted and warped into a paradox machine is something that she might have expected to break him. She might expect his knees, which aren’t as steady as they used to be, to buckle. She might expect to see tears collecting in the folds of a face that hadn't had wrinkles yesterday. She might expect that – but she doesn’t, and even if she did, the Doctor would have surprised her.

He walks around the machine carefully, as though it is a bomb that’s about to go off. She knows, of course, that it has already gone off and is, in a sense, frozen in the moment of its detonation, a bomb sending temporal shrapnel throughout the universe. She thinks about telling him this, but decides that it will be much more interesting if she leaves him to figure this out for himself. He reaches out, tentatively at first, running a fingertip across the deceptively wooden grain. Then, apparently unsatisfied by this, he takes a step closer and puts his hand against it. In that moment, Illyria is reminded of nothing quite so much as a deaf composer trying to listen to music through the vibrations of his instruments. Can he not hear the paradox? Can the Master?

The Doctor looks at her. Not as though she’s a puzzle to solve, or as though she’s a brand new toy. He looks at her as he might look at one of the others, the people who travel with him in his ship. He looks at her, and when he speaks his voice is warm. “Thank you.”


	18. Chapter Eighteen

Illyria doesn’t like to ask questions. There are two reasons for this. The first, and usually most important, is that she simply doesn’t _care_. People are small, and the things they say are hardly worth the effort it takes to say them. They have nothing of interest to say, and so Illyria doesn’t ask them to say it.

This isn’t the case with the Doctor, however. Just as it isn’t with the Master. They are closer to being her peers than anything else can be. She will not, _cannot_ bring herself to admit ignorance in front of them.

So she doesn’t ask the Doctor why he’s thanking her. Her expression isn’t quizzical, and there is no inquisitive tilt to her head. There is nothing about her that suggests that she doesn’t know what he’s talking about. She just stands there in the doorway, watching him.

He seems to understand anyway. His expression changes. Suddenly he is confused, uncertain. It’s the face of someone who had thought something, and now thinks that he might have been wrong. “You don’t... hmm.”

Illyria says nothing, does nothing. She is ice, inscrutable and cold.

“Time Lords are telepathic.” He says, by way of explanation. “Not really keen on it myself, prefer to stay out of people’s heads – always struck me as a bit impolite – but the talent is there. Our ships are sentient, too. One of the first things we learn is how to link ourselves to them. The link never breaks, never, not as long as we both live.”

He gestures dismissively at the paradox machine. Illyria wonders how he can bring himself to do so. The only explanation she can come up with is that he simply doesn’t know what it is. “There’s no mind there. Not because she’s dead. I’d know if she were dead. TARDISes have a tendency to leak space when they’re dead. Wouldn’t fit one on this ship. There’s no mind, and it feels like there never was a mind. There’s nothing there. She’s as blank as a stone.”

“You think that I had something to do with that.” Illyria says neutrally.

“Yes. The Master wouldn’t have killed it. He couldn’t do that any more than I could. He’d have just hidden it and left it to scream, waiting for me. Then, when I turned up here, when I was this close, I’d have felt it. I’d have found it, and then...” The Doctor shrugs expressively. “But I didn’t feel it. I still don’t. This is my ship’s body, but the mind isn’t here. It feels like it was never here. The Master wouldn’t have done that. I’m thinking that maybe you did.”

Illyria looks at him for a long moment before speaking. “It was alive when I first heard it. I heard it, it and the paradox, side by side. The paradox was like a cancer, devouring it from beneath. It was an endless roaring that almost swallowed its screams, but the screams were there. Then I saw it, in the Master’s office. They were both so loud that I couldn’t understand how the building was still standing, how there were still humans scuttling around. How were they not deaf? How were they not _dead_? I saw it, and I told it to shut up. It did. For less than a second, it stopped screaming. The paradox was still there, a drumming tearing apart the air, but there was no more screaming.”

The Doctor merely looks at her, the very picture of calm.

“I spoke to it again, sometime later when the Master was bored of me, when he shut me in a room with no doors or windows. He shut he me away in a room too small to sit in, to wait for months until you showed up, so he could trot me out and use me to gloat. I spoke to it again, and I said... nothing that you would understand. There was no language involved. There was no voice. But it listened again, it heard me. It obeyed. The Master thinks I pulled its mind out, that I spoke to it and it tumbled into me as though I were nothing but a great empty void. He is not entirely wrong, I think.” Illyria looks at the Doctor intently. “Are you quite sure that you want to thank me, Doctor?”

The Doctor shrugs again. “An argument could be made that just about anything is better than leaving something to be gutted by a paradox. ‘Sides, it’s not like you’re really sure what happened.”

“Surety is for fools and gods.” Illyria says simply. “When time breaks, only a fool will claim that something is certain. Only a god will _know_. I am no fool.”

“Not a god either, I think.”

Illyria smiled thinly. “There is a thing that humans do. They take a piece of paper and fold it carefully. They strive to make it as aerodynamic as possible, and they throw these paper planes and smile. They smile because they know that these paper things are as nothing compared to the planes that they have built. They are crude replicas, barely a shadow of what they could be. But of course, there are things far beyond planes. Things like your ship. Things that humans can barely even begin to conceive of. I look human, Doctor, as do you. But we are not. Humans are crude, paper things, and we are so far above them that they cannot even begin to wrap their minds around the edges of what we are. I am not a god, Doctor. Not anymore. But I am the closest thing to one that this world will ever see.”

“Who are you?” The Doctor asks, softly. “Who are you, Illyria?”

“Who am I? Who I am is... uninteresting. As a person I am dull. I spend years at a time motionless. I am not a sparkling conversationalist. I am not like you two. Who I am is not relevant to anyone or anything. Who I was is perhaps more interesting, but I don’t think that we have enough time for me to tell you. In any case, the past is a difficult concept when the future can wipe it away in a moment. What I am is perhaps the most important question. There is no easy answer to that. What I am _not_ is less than half the answer. I am not a person, Doctor. There used to be a person in this body, but I carved her out and burned her away. There is nothing there, now. I am hollow. The Master thinks I’m an escape pod for your ship. You think... I don’t know what you think, and I’m beginning to think that I don’t care. Perhaps all I am is an echo chamber for the paradox and a sounding board for the Master.”

“Shall I tell you what I think?” The Doctor says. He does not wait for an answer. “I think you’ve spent too much time with the Master. He has a tendency to treat people like things, and after enough time spent with someone like that you begin to think that maybe, just maybe, you’re a thing too. Could be that you’ve spent too much time with people who don’t really get who you are, too. Humans can be a bit... small-minded, that way.”

“They can’t think about time properly.” Illyria says, as though the Doctor hadn’t spoken. “Humans. They cannot think about the future and they can barely even remember their own pasts. The future is an alien thing to them. There is only now – the eternal, present struggle. But the future is clear to me. I saw the future the moment I first met the Master, when I heard his four-beat rhythm and saw time breaking around him. I knew he would rule the world, and here we are. I saw the future again, when I was walking through your ship. It has so many memories of you, Doctor. Some of them haven’t happened yet. I didn’t realise it at first, but the Master did. The Master knows – he understands. I saw you, Doctor. I saw you wearing the same face you’re wearing now. I saw you say that you don’t want to go, saw you cry. I’ve seen you die, Doctor. The Master thinks his paradox can abort your futures. Maybe he’s right. I don’t really care. I am not a thing. I am not his tool.”

The Doctor frowns. He doesn’t seem to be particularly perturbed by the news that Illyria has seen him die. If anything, he is simply perplexed. “Hmm. Time doesn’t work like that. He should know better than that.”

Illyria shrugs. To say that time ‘works’ seems like the kind of thing that a human would say. Time is/was/will be broken, and the paradox machine is steadily grinding away whatever fragments aren’t left. Soon there will have never been anything other than dust. Time doesn’t have to work the way the Doctor thinks it does, not when it barely even exists. “If you like, you can ask him. He loves to talk. More than anything, he loves to talk. Twice now, he’s told me how his machine works. He knows I wasn’t listening. He might tell you. I’m sure he’ll grin as he tells you how he made a mosaic of your ship’s organs.”

The Doctor’s frown deepens. “Tell me. I have one question, just one. Please, tell me – are you with him? The Master, are you with him?”

Illyria doesn’t have to think before she answers. There has always been only one answer to that question, and even if there was no time, no space or light or matter, there would still only be one answer. “No.”

The Doctor seems to have anticipated the answer, but even so, his frown doesn’t leave his face. There’s a question on his lips, but he is far too polite to let it go any further than that. Illyria doesn’t have to psychic to hear it, though. She can see it written in the way he stands.

“What’s the point of you?”


	19. Chapter Nineteen

Whatever Illyria might have said – and her saying anything at all is far from certain – is pre-empted by a squeaking door. She isn’t particularly surprised to the see the door to the paradox machine swing open to reveal the Master, immaculately dressed and limned in the red light of a temporal explosion. Neither is the Doctor, who merely sighs.

“Time to go, Doctor.” The Master says, stepping forward and grasping the other Time Lord by his elbow. “You’ve been out long enough, and you aren’t as young as you used to be.” He doesn’t pay any attention to Illyria at all as he begins to steer him out of the room. The Doctor does, however – he shoots her a look over his shoulder. Not as though he expects her to do something. He doesn’t strike her as the sort of person who expects something. She thinks he’s more interested in seeing what she’ll do.

What she does is nothing at all. She stands still, as though she were the only person there. She listens, of course, but they say nothing. There is nothing but the oddly syncopated rhythm of their hearts. Nothing but that and the paradox, that is, which is always/never there.

For the first time since meeting the Master, Illyria has nothing to do. The paradox has been and stayed, the Doctor arrived and she spoke to him in a way which she assumed was what the Master wanted. She has exactly as much to do as she did when she was a motionless figure in a room in Cleveland.

She smiles. Maybe that isn’t quite true. There are plenty of things that she _could_ do. She just doesn’t have to do them. Whatever she is going to do, then, is going to be something she chooses. An action of her own, not something dictated by the Master or temporal laws.

~*~

She finds Lucy on the bridge.

She is the only person there, if one doesn’t count the Toclafane whizzing about the room. Which she doesn’t.

Lucy isn’t the same person that Illyria had met all those months or days ago. There is no longer anything remotely self-conscious about her. She appears to have adapted well to being the wife of the man who conquered the world.

Lucy has managed to acquire a deck chair from somewhere, and is lounging on it in a bikini as though she were at the beach. She is wearing sunglasses and, though she is not quite asleep, she is close to it. If she is concerned about the fact that the Toclafane are busy enslaving her species, she isn’t showing it.

Illyria finds a chair left over from the broadcast which has been shoved into a corner, and brings it over to Lucy. She sits on it, and says nothing.

Lucy opens one eye when she hears her, but all she sees is a security human in a fancy suit. They had met before, the Old One and the Master’s wife, but Lucy didn’t remember that. She was a human, and so she doesn’t remember things that, strictly speaking, never happened. She closes her eye again. “Can I help you?” Lucy says. Her tone suggests that the answer had better be ‘no’, but she is still a well-bred English woman. The habit is ingrained in her too deeply for her not to ask.

“What was the end of the universe like?” Illyria asks. Her tone is conversational, as though that is the kind of question that people ask every day.

At this, Lucy props herself up on her elbows and examines Illyria intently. Illyria knows that she sees nothing more than she had already seen. Her shell is enough for that, and Lucy is too human to see through it. “I’m sorry. Who are you?”

Illyria has no intention of answering that question. Not again. “Just tell me.”

Lucy shoots a glance at the nearest Toclafane, but it doesn’t seem to pay any attention to her in the slightest. Instead of comforting her and convincing her that this meant that Illyria was no threat, it seems only to unnerve her. “Dark. Cold. _Empty_. But really-“

“Did it occur to you that it was a test? That he was pushing you to see how far he could go? Or was it a trial by fire, something that, if endured, would bind you together?”

“We were married there, if you must know.”

“There was a ceremony. A silly man in silly clothes said words in a language we didn’t understand. He was scared, and kept looking at the sky. We frightened him just by being there.” It wasn’t Lucy who spoke. It was a Toclafane, from just behind Illyria’s head. This one is male, unlike the one she’d spoken to before. It spins in front of her, then behind. It spins around her – not for any seeming purpose, but rather because that seems to be what they do. They don’t seem to ever be still.

Lucy’s lips curve into a smile. “They were our witnesses. One of them was even our ring bearer.”

Illyria looks at her, ignoring the spinning orb. She suspects that the Toclafane is annoyed by this, but she doesn’t care. “But there must have been a moment. A test. Some time when he pushed just a little too far.”

Lucy matches her gaze. “You think he was testing me when he took me to the end of the universe?” There is the faintest hint of amusement in her voice.

Illyria doesn’t tell her that she knows that it was. The Master had told her so. Though this conversation seems like the frantic questioning of a security human trying to understand her new overlord, nothing could be further from the truth. In this moment, she feels as though she has a firm grasp on the alien mind of the alien man. She isn’t trying to understand him, because she doesn’t need to try. But Lucy’s mind is stranger to her than that of the man from another world. It is she that she is trying to understand. “Yes.”

Lucy’s smile remains for the barest fraction of a second, but it is the smile of someone who has lost all interest in this conversation. Then she lies back, folds her hands behind her head and closes her eyes. The dismissal is clear.

In that moment, Illyria wonders who is more empty – the hollowed out shell with no organs to speak of, or the human woman.

She stands, and moves to the window. Though she sees the world stretched out beneath her feet, she pays it no attention. There is nothing to see down there. Truthfully, there is nothing to see in the sky, either. It is whole once more, not even a hint of scar tissue from when the paradox ripped it in two. It is simply the sky, as it has always been. The paradox here is neither quieter nor louder here. There is nothing to see, but then there never has been. She might as well be in a room covered in dust, motionless, covered in spider webs. There is nothing to see, so she closes her eyes and listens. There is the hum of engines, the hammer of Archangel and, above all, the harmony of a paradox. 

There is also the hiss of a sphere made of metal, as it spins around her. She reaches out, her arm moving as fast as thought, and in her hand she holds a future. She opens her eyes and is unsurprised to see that the Toclafane has sprung a half dozen blades, all of which are ready to slice through her skin at a moment’s notice.

The moment comes, the moment goes, and there is no violence. “Did he test you? Did he have to, or are you exactly what you seem to be?”

“He tested our patience. We waited so long. So very long. In the dark and the cold we waited. He made us new forms, shiny and free, but he made us wait for them. We were slavering, twisted things waiting for rebirth in a dead universe. He tested our patience.” The Toclafane says. There is no nuance to its voice – the Master has long since stripped them of that. It is odd to hear these words in a cheerful if tinny voice. “You are like us. We are from the end of the universe, plunged in a time not our own.” It retracts its blades. “He told us about you. Said that you aren’t like others. We aren’t to play with you.”

“I’m not surprised. The Master isn’t the kind of person to share his toys.” Illyria says. “But he’s wrong. I’m not like you. Oh, my universe ended – my universe is nothing but dust, but you said that this is not my time, and that’s where you’re wrong, where he’s wrong. One of you asked what the paradox sounds like, but if you could hear it, then you’d know. _All_ time is my time. There is no trick to time that I do not know, and when time breaks I know where the pieces go.”

The Toclafane hummed something that could have been agreement, or could have been the mere whine of a machine which is not designed to stand still being forced into motionlessness by a grip of iron. “This is our time because we make it so.”

“That’s one way of thinking about it.” Illyria agrees. “Another is that it is mine, simply because I am in it. Whenever I am, then that time is mine.”

It is quite obvious that the Toclafane doesn’t know what to make of this. Given that it has the mind of a child, it doesn’t even try. It asks a question nevertheless, perhaps out of curiosity, perhaps for some other reason. “Which way do you think?

Illyria doesn’t answer immediately. “At first, when I met the Master, I thought he was testing me. I wasn’t sure whether I passed or failed. But then I thought he was just pushing me to see how far I’d go. If there was a test, it was one I could only fail. But now I think I was wrong. He told me that he’d brought me Giles because he wanted to ruin the Slayers. He was the one who organised them, and without him there would be chaos. He showed me Riley Finn, and the things he was working on, and everything made it seem as though all he wanted was a war. He wanted to burn things down and show them to me.” Illyria drops the Toclafane. It moves quickly, to and fro, as though clearing whatever passes for its head. 

“But he almost told me he was lying. Giles was a test, and I failed it because I couldn’t see it for what it was. Giles could, perhaps, have stopped me from taking this body. People reached out to him, but he ignored them. He was a test, to see if I’d kill him for having a part in my diminishment. But I only killed him for being human. For being too small to see what I was saying, for not being able to grasp the future. The Master was right. I killed him because he was small, and I am not. Then I saw the Master do the same thing, and I didn’t even realise.”

“So, in answer to your question, I think... I think that I have learned all I can from standing still. It is time to move.”


	20. Chapter Twenty

Illyria isn’t terribly surprised to hear slow clapping coming from behind her. She hadn’t heard the Master walk in, but then she hadn’t been listening for him either. Though the four-beat rhythm of his hearts are loud, the paradox is louder still. She doesn’t turn around, not immediately. Though every clap speaks sarcastic volumes, she has no need to engage in a power struggle. Petty games like this will always be won by the Master, but she doesn’t have to play them. Not anymore. So she stands for a long moment, eyes closed and the paradox pulsing.

When she does turn around, she isn’t wearing the face which, for lack of a better term, is usually considered hers. When she turns around, it is almost, but not quite, like looking in a mirror. There are two reasons why it is not.

The first and most noticeable is that, though she and the Master are wearing the same face, their expressions are different. Though they are both smiling, Illyria’s expression is one of pure, unadulterated happiness. The Master, meanwhile, has something draped across his mouth which _might_ be called a smile, but which also might be called a smirk or a sneer. There is happiness there too, but it is the happiness of seeing someone make a move and realising that he can make a better one himself.

The second is at once simpler and less immediately obvious. They aren’t wearing the same clothes. Oh, they’re both wearing immaculately tailored suits and they hang identically on identical bodies, but the suits aren’t the same. The last time the Master had worn the clothes Illyria now appeared to be wearing had been a few days ago – and/or a few months before that, in a vanished time line. But this little difference might not have been noticed at all, were it not for the gun gracing Illyria’s hip, and completely ruining the lines of the suit.

The Master laughs shortly. _Point to you_ , it says. “Finally. I was wondering when we’d get to this. When you stopped being a leaf blown by the force of my gale.”

“Yes.” Illyria says simply. There is more, so much more, that can be said – but nothing that _needs_ to be said. The paradox can talk for her, at least to those with ears to hear.

“Well, that’s good then. Isn’t it good? A decision, an _action_... might I ask what it is?” 

“I thought about killing you.” 

The Master nodded, as though he expected nothing else. “How were you planning to do that?”

Illyria shrugged, different shoulders moving in different ways to the same end. “Putting my hand through your chest seemed fitting.”

“Hmm. You know, of course, that the Toclafane would cut you down before you could even take a step?”

Illyria is an excellent mimic. It takes no effort at all to twist her representation of the Master’s face into an imitation of the expression he is currently wearing. “Certainly looks that way, doesn’t it?”

The Master’s expression shifts. If nothing else, he knows her. “What did you do?”

“You haven’t put it together yet? Illyria says lightly. “Even now, with me wearing this face. You haven’t worked it out.”

The Master tilts his head quizzically as he tries to work out what she’s saying.

“Oh, that’s good. Isn’t it good? Shall I give you a hint? A hint in your voice?” Illyria clears her throat unnecessarily. “It’s mine. Mine by conquest.”

“Right.” The Master says slowly. “Yeah. I remember saying that, after you came out of the paradox machine. When you told me you saw the temporal echoes.”

“Come on! Think it through. You were in the paradox machine when I was talking to the Doctor. You heard what we said. No? One more hint, then.” Illyria bounces on her heels excitedly, her expression, her clothes, her _face_ a perfect imitation of when she and the Master had first met. When she speaks, the words sound exactly the same as they had when the Master had said them.

Or almost perfect. There is one word that’s different.

“You hear it, don’t you? The paradox. You hear it.”

The Master narrows his eyes for a fraction of a second while he puzzles over her clue, and then they widen as he solves the puzzle. “Ah.”

Illyria doesn’t bother to hide her crushing disdain. “Now you get it.”

“Right then. That makes things... interesting.”

“It does more than that.” Illyria points out, leaning forward. “It makes you _wrong_.”

The Master shrugs. “In the particulars, perhaps. But you did pull the mind out of _my_ machine. It just turned out not to be the mind I thought it was.”

“I told you. There is no trick to time I don’t know. I hear the paradox. I hear it as though it was my own heart – because it is. My life blood is broken time. The ship doesn’t scream anymore because it isn’t a ship. It doesn’t scream because it has a brand new voice. You can’t kill me, Master. Even if you’re able to, if you can kill someone with no last breath, you _can’t_ kill me. If you did that, you’d lose – and we both know you won’t do that.”

“So, then. What now? I... won’t kill you. You, I think, won’t kill me. What’s left? What’s the next move?”

“There was a time when I needed the universe. I conquered dimensions without number, even the one with nothing but shrimp, because I had the power and the will to use it. Mine were the only actions that mattered – all of creation could react to my whims. I plotted. I schemed. And when someone else came with the power and the will to act, I came to you like a moth to a flame. But I was hollow, and I knew hollowness when I saw it. The paradox is beautiful because it’s the sound of things ending.” Illyria hesitates for a moment, Archangel murmuring away at the back of her mind, _dread-cower-worship-obey_. “What’s my next move? Check mate.”

There isn’t a moment. Time doesn’t have to work the way that people think it does. There isn’t a moment. There is no change, because without time there can be no change.

What there is, though, is the sound of things ending.

Illyria looks up, and sees herself. Or, at least, she sees as much of herself as can be seen in four dimensions. She sees the edges of herself, and the edges of a few more things besides.

At no time that can be pinpointed, the past crashes into the future, and some things end. Illyria feels like a drum skin which has been stretched too tight, and she is breaking, and she’s never been happier.


End file.
